Hedges is writing about, and scolding, a class he is a member of; his moral outrage is probably systematized in his own mind by a conceptual framework learned earlier in the Christian ministry (he is the son of a preacher and went to divinity school, similar to MLK, Jr.), and his smooth populist style of presentation (topical, not overly deep, like Rev. Bill Moyers) was honed in his career as a journalist (war correspondent).

My wife recommended the book, which she got from our public library (it’s pricey). Hedges has put the basics of the leftist (socialist/environmentalist) message into an easily digestible form of modest proportion. The good of this is that it should have wider appeal.

I have no strong criticisms of Hedges’ book since I can see my version of his same thoughts throughout most (but not all) of it. One might criticize the fact that Hedges does not conclude with any practical action a motivated reader could take to change the national politics described. Hedges is presenting “the vision thing” to a wide audience; he may urge us to revolt, but this is purely rhetorical (and, in fact, leads into a discussion of revolt as attitude, taken from Camus, which I, myself, have done in my writing).

For regular (and friendly) readers of CounterPunch (CP), there would be no new lessons in political theory or political philosophy in Hedges’ book, though one might certainly pick up any number of interesting tidbits and connections — Hedges is a highly educated, well connected, and experienced observer; also, imbued leftists would not gain any tactical practicalities from Hedges. But, such leftists might enjoy, or find it interesting, to read a sincere and yet breezy longish essay (not a big book) that reflects their sentiments, and ‘mainstreams’ their overall point of view.

Hedges concludes his book with a good deal of pessimism, seeing the dawning (or even later on the first day) of an anticipated dark age in American life. I agree that skepticism toward the idea of progress is appropriate, given the evidence of recent history, but I also think it a mistake to believe we are necessarily doomed (or alternatively, destined to be “saved”) by some form of historical determinism: people could think and act differently, as a unified society, to change the present trends and to aim at different political economies. How to activate that “could” throughout American society is the nub of the leftist problem.

Hedges describes why he is led to his concluding pessimism, so the book’s ending can be a useful point of departure for other analysts and critics. Why or why not to worry; and what to do and how, are open to discussion. And this is true of nearly everything written as political criticism from the left.

I thought of writing a thorough review of Death of the Liberal Class, but I can’t convince myself CP-type readers would really care about such a review, since for them the book could only be at most a reflection of their own thinking (with no theory lesson, no practical recipes), though nicely expressed. (Actually, the thought that whatever I might write would likely be pointless as advocacy, has becalmed that activity: we are living in times of faith and omniscience.)

I suspect a large part of Hedges’ pessimism comes from his self-realized redundancy, and this is something I can understand. Hedges knows himself to be a liberal (like a European “social democrat”, I would think) whose capabilities, education, and advantageous circumstances have granted a comfortable life by the publication of his thoughts, and elevated him beyond the working classes. But he and his peers of similar type in elite social circles (note the people he interviews, among them Chomsky, Finkelstein and Nader) are totally ignored by both the working classes (“consumers”, the widest public) and the political management class, in the crafting of national policies. To most Americans, Hedges and his ilk are boutique, marginal froo-froo. Hedges and those who think like him are drowning in a rising tide of indifference to the decay of civic virtue.

Death of the Liberal Class is a lament with recriminations, written as one man’s extended political epitaph of his own social function.

You canʼt separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X (1925-1965)

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,…”
– Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

In politics the choice is never between good and evil but between the preferable and the detestable.”
– Raymond Aron (1905-1983)

Freedom from dictatorship is a human right. A global recognition of this right in modern times is Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Dictatorship is the captivity of a people’s political rights, and is thus an analog of slavery, which is the captivity of their personal freedom. Assisting popular rebellions against dictatorship is always a defense of human rights. Dictatorships, being inherently unjustifiable, can never claim self-defense in their efforts to cling to power; the only act they can justify is self dissolution.

Dictators hold unwilling supporters through intimidation, and willing supporters through promises of material gain and social elevation. Supporters of a dictatorship facing a popular uprising can never claim equal consideration in world opinion to the rebels opposing them, because such supporters are complicit in violating human rights by helping impose a dictatorship.

Doing what is right is not always convenient, and tolerating what is wrong is often temporally advantageous. So, despite the intrinsic illegitimacy of dictatorships, democratic nations may accept normal relations with certain of them because it is convenient politically and profitable commercially. Maintaining a foreign policy of such amoral practicality is never an honorable argument against assisting a foreign rebellion against dictatorship that has won public sympathy. Let us celebrate the few times international actions are taken because they are the humanly decent thing to do.

Later, our propagandists will easily recall the imperfections of motive and execution by our governments, and that data will then fuel the competition to define and exploit the historical record of the events. Though annoying, this is of minor importance compared to the immediate and most worthy goal: defending human lives and human rights.

The likelihood in late March of 2011 that a significant loss of life would be inflicted by Muammar Gaddafi’s jet bombers, artillery, armored troops and security forces in Benghazi was too real a prospect to ignore without then becoming complicit in the outcome, by omission. Gaddafi had vowed to “bury” the rebels, and we can be sure that after a Gaddafi victory a thorough purge of Libyan society would have occurred to ensure no embers of dissent remained to ignite another popular outburst of lèse majesté. Clearly, without outside assistance — minimally, a large infusion of heavier weapons — the lightly armed militias defending the western approaches to Benghazi would have been rolled back, and the anti-Gaddafi revolt crushed.

Opposition to intervention on behalf of the Libyan rebellion has been voiced from three perspectives:

Isolationism: it is an unnecessary national burden in possible blood and certainly treasure, with a risk of escalating into a political military quagmire;

Pan Africanism: it would undermine Pan Africanism if Muammar Gaddafi were to lose control of Libya’s wealth (which funds mercenaries from Sahelian countries, and foreign black political groups) and political power (to compel adherence to Pan African ideals by the largely Berber and Arab native Libyan population);

Anti-imperialism: NATO action in Libya is just an excuse to mount a Washington-consensus imperialist assault on an oil-rich nation that for over forty years has opposed such imperialism.

Beyond doubt, there is some truth to each of these. Isolationism is convenient selfishness and very often wise policy. In this case it is also a vote in favor of Muammar Gaddafi. The other two objections arise from doctrinal thinking on world affairs. Despite their merits, no worthy international goals can justify the sacrifice of a nation’s freedom to a dictatorship. One has to wonder about the coldness of certain opponents of support for the Libyan revolt, who are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines,” as Raymond Aron wrote in 1955 about the French intelligentsia’s bewitchment by Stalinism.

Every individual has their particular formative experiences, which set their adult “natural reactions” to subsequent rhetorical arguments. Let me relate some of mine, to invite your imagination to “feel” my point of view.

I recall visiting my grandparents in the city of Havana during a summer vacation in 1958. The colors, warmth, sounds and odors of Cuba were all rich, pungent and sensuous. Equally impressive to a boy growing up in New York City was the flagrant poverty of many Cuban people: adults with naked rented children huddled at street intersections begging from the passing tourists.

Fulgencio Batista was Cuba’s dictator, whose regime Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. characterized this way: “The corruption of the Government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice … is an open invitation to revolution.” Bohemia magazine — the equivalent in Cuba of Life magazine in the U.S. at that time — would print pictures of revolutionaries shot dead during gunfights with Batista’s police, lying rumpled in pools of blood on the street. I only heard the adults talk Cuban politics back in New York, when I was taken to the upper west side of Manhattan, our old barrio, for haircuts at the Cuban barbershop below the elevated train along Broadway, and in the brownstone apartments of relatives and family friends during Sunday visits. Everybody was anxious, everybody wanted a free Cuba, everybody was thinking of Fidel.

Then, on the first of January 1959, Batista fled the island and Castro’s victorious army rolled into an ecstatically jubilant Havana on the 8th. We returned in June for a long summer vacation. Even in the Cubana de Aviación four-engine turboprop one could sense the uplift, the exhilaration of the Cuban Revolution. But the full impact hit me when I exited the airplane and walked into the lush aromatic heat of a tropical country whose people were rapt with joy. The beggar “families” were gone and barbudos — the bearded ones — were everywhere. The barbudos were revolutionaries in pristine khakis, with gunbelts holstering highly polished and uniquely detailed pistols, some silver-colored, some gold-colored, some gun-metal blue, some with very long barrels, some with artistically engraved handles. Only the beards were shaggy, all other items from boot soles to cap crests were neat, shiny and crisp. At first I was a little nervous when a barbudo would climb onto a streetcar or bus and sit near me. But I soon got used to sitting next to gold-plated long-barrel Lugers, gleaming mirror-finish silvery Colt 45s, and robust Smith & Wesson 44 caliber six-shot revolvers. Sidearms were definitely the display items of identity.

During that summer of 1959, we travelled all over the island and saw many remnants of revolutionary struggle, one being a bullet-pocked hospital in the countryside, once the scene of a battle, now happily back in service. I even met Fidel at Isla de Pinos (now Isla de la Juventud). However materially poor some Cubans could be, especially campesinos, peasants in the hinterlands, they were all just so happy: believing themselves free, life despite its burdens was now a joy. Every person, every place, every moment exuded the same sense of uplift. I was immersed in a national sense of freedom, and it soaked into my psyche and bones. This experience permanently magnetized my political compass, so that regardless of verbal arguments and logical constructs in later years, my compass always points my sympathies toward freedom for any people.

Today, I see the people of Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen as similar to the Cubans I lived among when at my grandparents’ house in Batista’s Cuba. They want freedom from their dictators, and I am incapable of being unsympathetic to their desires. Perhaps if I studied their cultures and histories, I’d find good reasons to overcome my emotional impulses in their favor. I might learn that “countries don’t have friends, they have interests.” If so, I would want to make sure that I did not compromise anything I had an interest in by thoughtless support of foreign revolts.

However, I find it impossible to conceive of the individuals I see and hear on the streets of North Africa and the Middle East as being that remote from my experience, especially the “wireless” younger generation.¹ They look like my kids. Do I really prefer to make logical arguments in favor of Muammar Gaddafi because it accords with my interest to oppose Western imperialism disguised as “humanitarian intervention”? I do not. Can I really put aside any consideration of the specificity of this particular revolution at this particular time (so inconveniently timed for us), and see a greater good in opposing any help to the anti-Gaddafi rebels because their freedom is not as important in the overall scheme of things as the effort to maintain strict nonintervention by Western powers? I cannot. I am unable to forget the people.

So let me ask you, is it possible to have a bias for freedom, an opposition to dictatorship anywhere, and also oppose the capitalist-imperialist consensus that dominates U.S. and European foreign policymaking? Is it possible to support popular revolutions against tyrants and dictators — no matter how doctrinally appealing certain of them might be for some of us — even to the point of arming popular revolts so they can credibly match the firepower of their oppressors? In short, can anti-imperialists elevate freedom to a guiding principle?

For me, solidarity with basic positive human aspirations throughout the globe supersedes strict adherence to any political doctrine.

Those who agree believe it is possible to identify situations worthy of support, where a people are visibly demonstrating their desire to throw off tyranny and govern themselves democratically, and their dictatorial regime is demonstrating its utter lack of legitimacy. In popular fiction, the character of Rick Blane, played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 movie Casablanca, could identify and support such revolutions. The French prefect of police in the film accuses Rick Blane of being a “sentimentalist,” because “In 1935 you ran guns to Ethiopia. In 1936, you fought in Spain on the Loyalist side.” Blane replies sardonically “And got well paid for it on both occasions.” The prefect rests his case with “The winning side would have paid you much better.”²

So, can we be sentimentalists? Was the French fleet at Yorktown in 1781 under the command of the Comte de Grasse entirely a matter of interests and not friends, or was there some sentimentalism involved? I leave it to you to decide if this French intervention was a good thing or a failure for history. Can the Cuban-led defeat of the South African Defense Forces at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 during the Angolan Civil War, with the liberation of Namibia and the initiation of the subsequent fall of apartheid in South Africa, be seriously regretted? The 2289 Cubans who died during Cuba’s intervention in southwest Africa, and the 450,000 Cuban soldiers and development workers who spent time in this effort, were probably sentimentalists even if many were too young to remember Havana in 1959.

The French, British and Americans, under the guise of NATO, have chosen to intervene in Libya, initially to halt Gaddafi’s assault on Benghazi in early April. The motive for intervening was some admixture of “sentimentalism” and “humanitarian imperialism,” but the exact proportions of each is a matter of heated debate. The pace of the war against Gaddafi will be set by the level and consistency of military assistance to the anti-Gaddafi population.

If the Libyan revolt leads to a stable democratic government, then the cause of freedom will have been very well served, especially if the post-Gaddafi government is clearly independent. If the NATO nations are unable to accept the possibility of an independent post-Gaddafi Libyan government, they won’t supply the revolutionaries with sufficient arms for a quick and decisive victory. Instead, they will dribble in just enough resources to keep Gaddafi confined to his corner while they try micromanaging the gestation of the eventual post-Gaddafi government so that it emerges as a client regime. This would be like Stalin’s policy in Spain during 1936 to 1939. This attitude was captured succinctly in the film Lawrence Of Arabia, where General Allenby is asked if he intends to keep his earlier promise to T.E. Lawrence, to arm the Arab troops with artillery in addition to small arms, so their revolt against Turkish rule can advance significantly: “If you give them artillery you’ve made them independent.” But, Allenby knowing what London wants, replies: “Then I can’t give them artillery, can I?”³

Sentimentalists hope the Libyan revolutionaries get the “artillery” they need, and enjoy their version of 1959 Cuban euphoria, however inconvenient their freedom turns out to be, later, for the humanitarian imperialists. Sentimentalists prefer to have friends rather than just interests, and you can’t tolerate others being oppressed or enslaved if you want them as friends.

We should not let our opposition to the misdeeds, mistakes and misapplications of our governments throttle our willingness to take advantage of spontaneous events that can lead to the overthrow of tyrants, and the release of political freedom for more people.

1. Emad Balnour (“We are clearing our country from Muammar and his gang.”), at 0:25-0:51.
2. Casablanca 04 (“sentimentalist”), at 1:48-2:18.
3. Lawrence of Arabia, “If you give them artillery you’ve made them independent.”

If you live under a repressive government, a dictatorship, a kingship, or any form of unrepresentative and arbitrary authority, and you would like to overthrow it and punish your oppressors, and establish a government that is widely representative, that safeguards your political freedom and provides easy access to meaningful participation, then be aware that you must do this entirely on your own. There is no possibility of help from foreigners.

The reason for this is that your freedom is inconvenient to the rest of the world. The world has made its accommodations with your present regime, and any disruption of those arrangements will inconvenience the plans of your international neighbors, by disrupting their expectations. It does not matter whether your oppressive government is seen as “good” or “bad” by other states, it is simply that they are accustomed to their present protocols of interaction, and any interruption of business-as-usual costs money and time, and creates anxiety about the future.

So, if you intend to overthrow your oppressive regime you must do so quickly to minimize the period of dislocation of your foreign relations. Clearly, a quick and complete turn-over of government can only occur if your rebellion has the overwhelming support of all sectors of your society with any amount of credible power or wealth. Accumulating and consolidating overwhelming revolutionary power, stealthily, is a problem you must solve entirely on your own if you wish to successfully overthrow your tyrants, and be accepted internationally as a legitimate successor government.

Some populations believe that their oppression is so onerous that they can no longer remain passive, and so they revolt without having made the necessary preparations for a quick and decisive take-over. If they are unfortunate, their tyrants quickly isolate and eliminate them, extinguishing the revolt. If they are somewhat fortunate, they are able to carry on as guerrilla movements that shelter underground and in the hinterlands. Such guerrilla movements can be assured that the regimes they oppose will use all the powers of the state to eradicate them, and in all likelihood other nations will support their suppression as terrorist movements because their activities will inevitably cause anxiety and even collateral damage to the business-as-usual of foreign nations. The club of nations does not look favorably on unruly aspirant movements, especially if they are armed and have demonstrated violent behavior. You are not evaluated on the basis of your cause, but on the basis of your effect.

Should an unprepared population break its discipline of submission with an open revolt that draws the heavy wrath of its regime down on them, and they seek rescue by foreign intervention, then they have lost any possibility of ever being seen as having political legitimacy. They will henceforth be taken as dupes and stooges, or agents and proxies of the foreign power that aids them; and if they actually succeed at forming a successor government it would always be seen as a client state of the intervening power. The idea of a population rising up solely on the basis of its own desire for political freedom, accepting material assistance from whoever delivers it during their time of crisis, and then after a successful revolution cordially thanking and dismissing its foreign helpers, and forming a fully independent and representative national government, is taken as impossible by general agreement. Regardless of what you may think of your own particular revolution, its factual circumstances cannot be accepted as a counterargument or disproof of the impossibility of assisted untainted revolution (the AURI principle).

The AURI principle immediately identifies legitimate revolutions from attempts to disguise, as “humanitarian interventions,” imperialist plots for undermining and secretly controlling foreign states. The application is simple: if foreigners are involved, they are invaders, and the degree of their imperialist intent is easily assessed by their position in the hierarchy of world power, relative to that of the host country. So, for example, one African nation sending its troops as “peacekeepers” into another would be doing so to seek greater regional power; while the United States sending any part of its military and espionage complex into an African country under any pretext would be blatant all-out imperialism.

Any revolutions that want to retain the respect of the world will guide themselves by the AURI principle; they will overcome their regimes entirely on their own (and thus gain the right to characterize the regimes they overthrow as tyrannical, dictatorial and oppressive, for future history). Any premature revolution that includes foreign interveners is instantly unmasked by the AURI principle, and the world need not concern itself with the individuals involved in it, because they are necessarily agents of imperialism and de facto traitors. If, for whatever reason, an immature population were to have a tantrum and unwisely revolt without long and careful planning and preparation, and then find itself hard pressed by its vengeful regime, it would be well advised to quickly recognize the world view on these matters and refrain from seeking any foreign help. So long as these failed revolutionaries retain their untainted status, they can be assured that their survivors will not be disqualified from consideration as legitimate politicians in any equally untainted successor government of their country. Also, any losing revolutions that remain untainted will have performed a valuable service to humanity: they will have successfully resisted imperialism in their corner of the globe during their lifetimes.

This last point is important because the single most important political goal in the world is to prevent the capitalist imperialism spearheaded by the United States and Western Europe, enabled by the United Nations, enforced by the NATO military complex, and acceded to by the industrialized nations. Preventing the reoccurrence of “humanitarian interventions” and “color revolutions,” which undermine the national independence of target states and brings them under the shadow control of the imperial center, is too important to allow any local popular disenchantment with the nature of its government to interfere with. Thus, any population that decides, out of its own irritation, that its rulers should be deposed must realize that more important things are at stake.

First, they have to determine if their revolution would weaken a stalwart opponent of imperialism, and distract him (the usual dictator gender) from current efforts in their country and region to thwart “Washington consensus” imperialism. If their regime is a champion of anti-imperialism, then it is their humanitarian duty to set aside their selfish motives to revolt. They should be consoled for the occasional heavy-handedness with which they may be ruled, by the pride they will have of sharing solidarity with anti-imperialists worldwide. What would be the point of overthrowing an anti-imperialist leader, in the name of gaining greater political freedom, perhaps even the right to a meaningful vote, if it weakens the barrier their former leader had maintained against imperialism’s subjugating influences in their nation?

So, in order to retain their legitimacy in the eyes of the world they must not try to deny the AURI principle, and in addition, to gain the respect and comradeship of the enlightened progressive communities of the world they must also demonstrate that all their revolutionary decisions are guided by an acute awareness of the need to maximize the anti-imperialist effect of their efforts. A revolution that fails to recognize the primacy of the anti-imperialist outcome, by either undermining an authoritarian anti-imperialist stalwart or failing to replace him with an untainted government of equal or greater anti-imperialist vigor, within a matter of days, does not deserve the support and respect of the enlightened and progressive world community. Such a revolution would be a destructive self-centered tantrum that contradicts the world political prime directive.

Therefore, if you intend to have a revolution because you want relief from oppression, to gain political freedom and to introduce democracy into your country, you would be wise to learn what is required to make your freedom convenient to the world’s contented spectators.

Robert Parry and Greg Palast have given objective details on the corrosive effects of thirty years of Reaganomics, and I have given subjective ones. However, sometimes an argument that is visceral, visual, perhaps illogical and reliant on memory can be more effective in transmitting an idea, and ideals. With this in mind, let’s compare two versions of the national anthem.

The Star Spangled Banner is the national anthem of the United States, and it is performed before major sporting events, like the National Football League’s Superbowl, whose 45th occurrence was on February 6, in Dallas, Texas. The singer chosen to perform the anthem for a nationally televised spectacle like the Super Bowl will be a popular performer whom the producers deem capable of reflecting the image of patriotism held by the sponsors and the audience. The singer will be proud, enthused by the opportunity for national exposure, and under pressure to satisfy mass expectations. The video record of the performance of the national anthem at the Super Bowl, this last Sunday, is also a record of who the “nationals” are that this “anthem” is being sung to. So, we can take this as an official picture of whom the powers-that-be assume is the nation, an anthropological artifact of the national mentality that produced the event.

Former US president (43rd) George W. Bush was in the audience, on this 100th anniversary (6 February 1911) of the birth of former US president (40th) Ronald Reagan. To my mind, Christina Aguilera’s performance of the Star Spangled Banner was a perfect reflection of its situation: shrill, inflated, artless, clumsy, soulless, an anthem for plodding self-satisfied commercialism.

One can think of other “nations” that the United States was or could be, such as the one Marion Anderson sang to in 1939 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Another such nation is one the people of the United States had a glimpse of in the 1960s, but were too fearful to commit to, hence the national decline since 1980. We could be a nation of peace, brotherhood and sisterhood, economic fairness, evident justice, and artful convivial creativity; all it takes is a little coordinated energy guided by our most humane imaginations. Jimi Hendrix performed the anthem for that nation, and the Star Spangled Banner has never sounded better.

It’s been a slow sad slide from Woodstock to Super Bowl XLV, why not go back and start over?

The “defend freedom” argument is laughable. Gun owners, as an organized political group, have been invisible in the defense of freedom in the U.S., and they have had many opportunities to do so, from defending civil rights in the 1960s right up to today: fighting against the Patriot Act, fighting to end the Iraq and Afghan-Pakistan wars, fighting to stop the ongoing “renditions,” fighting to close down U.S. military torture prisons like at Guantanamo, fighting to deconstruct the prison-industrial system and black confinement gulag. You can look in any direction today and find a freedom that needs defending immediately. The gun owner PACs have only shown an interest in defending their own freedom to play with their guns, regardless.

However, one pro-gun argument I received was mildly creative, and deserves a response. The argument states that 120,000 (120K) accidental deaths occur every year because of mistakes by some of the 700,000 (700K) U.S. medical doctors. This is a ratio of medical accident deaths per doctor of 1/5.83, which we can round to 1/6. So, for every 6 U.S. doctors there is one medical-accident death per year. However, for 80,000,000 (80M) gun owners (in a total U.S. population of 311.9M) there are only 1500 accidental gun deaths a year, or one per 53.3K gun owners, annually. The claim is then made that “statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.”

I guess this proves you should quit going to the doctor (and taking any prescriptions, which might just poison you), and you had better pack a gun. That way you can be sure that any gun accident occurring near you happens to somebody else (since you’ll be doing the pointing), and you can also protect yourself by shooting any doctor that comes too close.

This silly comparison of (and obvious joke on) iatrogenic and gun-caused accidental deaths does suggestion one idea, which is amplified in what follows: gun malpractice insurance.

Consider the following data:

75.7K non-fatal gunshot injuries per year in the U.S., of which:
52.5K are deliberate,
23.2K are accidental (statistics for 2000, from the US-CDC);

16K homicides/year in the U.S., of which:
9K by hand guns,
2K by other guns
(11K for gun homicides, total),
2K by knives,
2K by other methods,
1K by blunt objects;

17K suicides/year by guns (2004).

So, about 28K gun-deaths/year in the U.S.

For 311.9M people (U.S. population), this works out to:

gun homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by a gun): 1/28K,

total homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by any means): 1/20K,

gun suicides/person (or, probability you’ll shoot yourself dead): 1/18K,

gun deaths/person (or, probability of being killed by a gun): 1/11K,

gunshot injuries/person (or, probability of getting shot, and living): 1/4K.

Now, lets see how this comes out per gun owner (using 80M U.S. gun owners):

gun homicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/7K,

gun suicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/5K,

gun deaths (in general population)/#owners: 1/3K,

gunshot injuries (in general population)/#owners: 1/1K.

So each year:
for every 1000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot,
for every 3000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot dead,
for every 5000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person shoots themselves dead,
for every 7000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is murdered by gunshot.

Recall that for every 6 doctors there is 1 medical-accidental death per year. The hazards of medical practice have long been known and form the basis of the malpractice insurance industry (which, by the way, does a lot to raise the cost of “medicine,” this cash flow overhead going to insurance companies; how about nationalizing those companies to lower the cost of health care?)

A U.S. human is worth about $2M for a “reasonable” wrongful death damages/insurance settlement (the equivalent of $50K for a 40 year working life). (Yes, this is all very crass, but we are restricting argument to the absurdist confines of U.S. capitalist realpolitik.) However, court challenges to wrongful death claims, and legislation for protecting many industries like the airlines, set ridiculously low limits on settlements for fatal accidents, nearer $250K. So, I’ll use an average settlement of $0.5M to estimate the cost of malpractice insurance:

120K medical-accidental deaths/year, at $0.5M/per = $60B.

In fact the cost of medical liability insurance in the U.S. is about $55.6B/year, close to our estimate. However, since insurance companies probably absorb 30% to 50% of revenue for profit and overhead, the actual “average” settlement paid out must be closer to $250K to $350K.

For the 700K U.S. doctors, the average cost would be: $60B/700K = $85.7K = $7K/month. So U.S. doctors making $170K/year may spend up to half their income on their malpractice insurance (and or legal fees).

Fine.  Now let’s apply the same principle to gun owners. Let us allocate the cost of gun injury and death to “gun malpractice,” to be paid for by gun malpractice insurance, which gun owners would buy to compensate gunshot victims.

To estimate the cost of gun malpractice insurance let’s use measly settlements of:

$250K per gunshot death (paid to family members, obviously),
$100K per gunshot injury (paid for victim’s medical/rehabilitation & job/pay-loss expenses),

then for:

11K gun homicides/year, at $250K/per = $2.75B,

17K gun suicides/year, at $250K/per = $4.25B,

(28K gun deaths/year, at $250K/per = $7B),

75.7K gunshot non-fatal injuries/year, at $100K/per = $7.57B.

Total gun malpractice liabilities/year = $14.57B, round to $15B.

Now divide the cost among a total of 80M owners:

gun malpractice insurance premium (cost per owner) = $15B/80M = $188. A bargain, round generously to $200/year.

So it is entirely fair to charge gun owners about $200/year for “gun malpractice” insurance, which would help defray the costs to victims of gunshot. If the average awards were higher by a factor of 5 (to $1.25M per death and $500K for non-fatal injury), then the insurance premium would be $1000/year (and profit overhead for the insurance companies would raise premiums further).

Charging gun owners $1000/year for mandatory gun malpractice insurance does not seem unfair by comparison with what is done with M.D.’s, and it would not in any way infringe on gun owners’ sacred 2nd Amendment right to “defend freedom” personally. Such insurance would do a great deal to rein in both the private and public costs of U.S. trauma-response and health-care. Also gun malpractice insurance would be a great new capital industry, and such companies would probably be desirable investment vehicles.

It is obvious that the people of the U.S. accept the costs in gunshot injuries (76K/year) and deaths (28K/year) in the general population (312M), for the maintenance and convenience of unrestricted (or nearly so) gun ownership (80M owners). While no individual wants to be a victim of gun violence, we accept possibly having to make such personal sacrifice in order to uphold the higher social benefit of preserving the 2nd Amendment right of almost anyone being able to have all the guns of their choice as soon as possible.

However, some less-indulgent people, who do not have as high a regard for the U.S. Constitution as to accept this socialist accommodation, may agitate annoyingly for “gun control,” the restriction to gun ownership by legislation, even constitutional amendment. One argument they can use favorably is that the costs of gun violence are now borne unfairly by members of the public, gun owners or not, who happen to get shot.

This argument can be met by issuing gun malpractice insurance to gun owners, the proceeds of which will help compensate victims of gun violence (and create a new line of profitable insurance products). The existence of such insurance could be used by gun owners to indemnify them, individually and collectively, from “gun malpractice” liabilities. Indemnification would undoubtedly be set by legislation making gun malpractice insurance mandatory, in a similar way that medical malpractice insurance and automobile driving liability insurance are mandated.

Gun malpractice insurance would make maintenance of our 2nd Amendment freedom a win-win for both gun-owners and the non-gun members of the public, so long as you personally didn’t get shot up too badly. But if you did find yourself randomly chosen to participate in the socializing duty of gun action absorption, then you would have the comfort of knowing that the gun owners of America had provided for you to receive an immediate award of insurance money to help defray your medical expenses, and whatnot. That, and the red badge of courage pride you would have for your part in upholding the 2nd Amendment, would make you happy to be able to live with such freedom as we have in this country. Freedom carries responsibilities.

If you have ever masturbated or been hosted to an orgasm with a living or even an artificial phallus, or you have experienced the deep satisfaction of a nitrocellulose-warmed and jolted Muladhara chakra, as described by John Lennon in his primal scream song “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” then you know that the gun control debate is impervious to logical assault.

Nevertheless, I wish to make a suggestion.

First, let me say that I have no problem with anyone owning all the guns they want, so long as they don’t actually kill anyone (or anything) with them. Actually, that is too stringent; I don’t mind if a gunslinger absolutely hellbent on killing someone kills themselves — and no one else. This is a clean solution to the problem of finding a target for the killing urge and simultaneously safeguarding the public. I admit the result may not be entirely satisfactory to the family members of the killer, but I think it the best compromise short of avoiding a killing entirely.

Some have suggested that it is remotely possible that on rare occasions a shooting death would be a humanitarian blessing. This type of thinking usually seeps out of militaristic and war-games fantasies. However, I think such possibilities are so rare in civilian life that we can discount giving this excuse further consideration.

Proponents of unrestricted gun ownership and use usually base their argument on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the further argument of applying a “strict interpretation” to the Constitution: “following the intent of the framers,” or the intent of “the founding fathers,” without allowing for any re-interpretations — “deviations” they would say — as informed by later historical developments and evolved social thought.

Very well. My suggestion is the following. Allow for the unrestricted ownership and use of guns and ammunition as they existed in 1789, when the Constitution and its first ten amendments were written. This would conform EXACTLY to the intent of the framers. It would satisfy the 2nd Amendment freedom to “bear arms,” without allowing for any deviations from ‘strict interpretationalism’ that would excuse the weaseling in of ownership of semi-automatic and automatic guns, and anything beyond ball, shot and black powder for ammunition: no full metal jackets, no nitrocellulose propellant, no late 19th century cordite-filled cartridges, not even percussion caps (from about 1830). Just flintlocks.

If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for you.

Reaganomics is essentially unlimited military spending, plus a strident and mean-spirited anti-social and anti-environmental bias as regards public spending and the enforcement of regulations, plus an obsession with tax reduction (and elimination) for the highest economic classes, plus an overriding concern that government action invariably results in corporate benefit at the expense of the economic and political interests of labor (organized and unorganized) and the public. (There is no praise for Reaganomics in this article).

A recently published essay by Roberts presents his defense of Reaganomics,  and is a response to Robert Reich’s earlier critique of the same (“Reaganomics Redux” ).

I had great difficulty reading through Roberts’ defense of Reaganomics. What follows is my explanation of my difficulty.

I remember Reagan-time well, as it coincided with my early and peak career years as a nuclear bomb-testing physicist. During the last years of the Carter Administration I was unable to find any physics and engineering college teaching job that actually paid (e.g., Proposition 13 had erupted in California, initiating the collapse of public education there, and by example leading the national trend), and even corporate work was not so easy to find, so to nuclear bombs I went. I had been shopping around my new Princeton University Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (a sort of “rocket scientist”). I actually began working in a nuclear weapons laboratory in the second half of Carter’s term, when the post-Watergate political swing to the right (‘the wrong,’ actually) had became overt.

I had a very personal interest in the course of U.S. policy because I wished to apply my high tech skills to solving the “energy crisis” problems that had finally captured public attention with the 1973 and 1979 oil embargoes. There was that window of time between 1972 when the Watergate scandal erupted, and 1978 when Zbigniew Brzezinski was the undisputed master of U.S. policy (which was entirely a visceral Polish hatred of Russia), during which the American public mind was receptive to the idea of a concerted national effort to develop alternative and ecologically sound sources of energy.

During this Ford-Carter window of about six years, there was the last lingering 1960s’ sense of liberating possibilities, combined with the relief and opportunity offered by the “end” of the Vietnam War (in 1975, though covert missions continued for years afterward), and there was also a bracing realism inserted into public consciousness about oil and energy. I had the highest hopes my technical skills (gained with ten years of hard work) could connect to real social progress. I was excited that my personal development and career aspirations seemed to be fortuitously synchronized with the needs and hopes of the times.

Reagan was the total destruction of that dream. His first substantive act as president was the removal of the solar energy system on the roof of the White House, which had been installed during Carter’s term. This was as clear a message as a new Pharaoh in ancient Egypt ordering the defacement of a predecessor’s images on national monuments, or of one male lion who had killed another to win command of a pride (a group of females and their cubs) then killing all the cubs fathered by his beaten rival.

Reagan was a mean-spirited prick, and his administration was rich with similar types. The Reaganauts were careerist pasty-faced near-fascist pirates out to rape the national economy for their corporatist-plutocratic faction. The excessiveness of Reagan’s overblown and patriotic hyperbole was matched by the avidity and crassness of the plundering intent his public speech was meant to cloak.

I’m sure Paul Craig Roberts actually believed the self-serving hyperbole used by the Reaganauts, in the same way many military veterans will believe the justifications used to recruit and exploit them, and which many of them in turn use to maintain their own self-images thereafter. Patriotic myths are used as personal mantras of denial, for example over a functional role as a cog in a larger system that perpetrated war crimes, or as a functionary of military-industrial complex economic parasitism.

Listen to the old soldiers of Spain’s Falange or Pinochet’s military, who become sentimentally patriotic about how they and theirs “saved the country,” while they are much more reticent about their work as torturers and thieves. There are too many similarly self-satisfied veterans in many nations. I’ve heard too many U.S. military veterans (i.e., more than one), who had decades of cushy jobs and subsidized living, whine about “welfare” and “illegal immigrants,” when it is they who represent the most heavily subsidized lifetime-welfare class of them all.

The few veterans we can really respect are those who have wakened up to the reality of what their roles really were, and who actually state these facts. Veterans of this type are invariably anti-war, and invariably for social and economic justice. Someone like Chalmers Johnson, who just recently died, won my grateful and admiring respect with his introduction to his book “Blowback.” He stated unequivocally that he was wrong to support the Vietnam War during the 60s; the student protestors who he and his academic and policy specialist peers viewed as immature, uninformed and uneducated were, in fact, right, while he and the U.S. policy establishment were wrong.

Johnson had enough brains to ascertain the truth, and enough character to admit it, and then go on to change the direction of his work. Yes, this means he was willing to allow the world to see his prior life as a Vietnam War advocate as a wasted effort, as a contribution to human misery. He was a man.

The film “Sir! No Sir!” is about soldiers who went through similar transformations while the Vietnam War raged. See it to be humbled by real patriotism. Was Johnson’s awakening of lesser merit because it occurred after the war? Some might assign lesser merit to individuals who admit much later in life that their youthful contributions to empire produced unnecessary misery rather than social value. In my view, anyone who has this type of realization deserves respect and appreciation, because whenever such an awakening occurs it adds to the positive example to youth, and the wider advocacy of humanistic politics. So hurrah for Chalmers Johnson, hurrah for Daniel Ellsberg, hurray for Ray McGovern, hurrah for Scott Ritter, hurrah for Chuck Spinney, Hurrah for William Blum, hurrah for Jessica Lynch, hurrah for all the veterans against the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and hurrah for Bradley Manning. Whether they came to it early or late, I say hurrah for anyone who is unequivocally against the wars and the imperialism behind them, especially when they graduated themselves out of the troops implementing those wars (whether the shooting wars or the class war).

Naturally, my views on this are self-serving, so I can reconcile my life today with my own contributions to building up the U.S. nuclear stockpile. There are many other current and former weapons workers who prefer to take the apologist tack, like the Spanish Falangists, Chilean Pinochetists, and U.S. military welfare overhead class: “we weren’t trying to enrich ourselves, we were trying to serve the country by ensuring the technology needed for its defensive systems was as robust, reliable and efficient as possible; we were primarily interested to ensure the peace, and to keep people safe.” The implicit psychological message of imperial legionnaire apologist cant is: “Aren’t I holy? Don’t you owe me your gratitude for what I did for your benefit, unseen, all those years ago, when I could have been in the private sector making more money?”

My response is: sorry, so-called patriots, but puffing up your self-images with false history is an insult. Regardless of what you did then, and what you thought you thought then, if you can’t admit the facts about the past you participated in, and which are so obvious today, then I can’t extend my complete appreciation for those good turns you are doing today. Perhaps if I were Christ or Buddha, my charitable understanding would be perfect; but I’m not, and it isn’t. This is my reaction to Paul Craig Robert’s defense of Reaganomics.

Reaganomics was not meant to help most of the American (or any other) people.  It was a scheme of larding the rich. That is what it did, and to the detriment of the United States as a nation, a result that was as clearly inevitable then as it is obvious in retrospect today. The American republic of 2010 is a paper-thin shell whose substance was hollowed out by thirty years of Reaganomics dry rot.

One can accept an idealistic politically conservative Paul Craig Roberts believing implicitly in the hyperbole that promoted Reaganism in 1980, but thirty years later? After what we’ve seen it destroy? It seems that in the contest of ego versus truth, ego still dominates here. Of course, that is a personal choice that has its right to be made (our wish about another person’s choice on self-image maintenance can never be imagined as their obligation), but it throttles the appreciation I would prefer to extend unhindered.

All the military brigs and stockades are filled to overcrowding with such disorderly service -men and -women, but the number of offenders is so vast that the services cannot confine the entire population of “sexual orientation mutineers” (SOMs), as the top brass have dubbed them. This “purple passion military awakening,” as advocates from national LGBT organizations have labeled this phenomenon, is a surprise to everyone and has instantly undone ongoing military operations.

The obvious problem is that as openly gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen are deemed unfit for the U.S. military (because of DADT), the services now find themselves without personnel to implement the many campaigns being waged. In frantic emergency meetings at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are struggling through what is reported to be acrimonious debate to arrive at a consensus on what to do.

One option advanced by fiscal conservatives is to proceed immediately with mass discharges of current military personnel (which these conservative advisors recommend be “dishonorable” so as to dramatically reduce the future cost of veterans’ benefits) and then try to quickly recruit and train a new mass of acceptably ‘gayless’ — or at a minimum, undetectably gay — soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen.

This tack is seen as too damaging to military readiness, and the continuity of military operations, by liberal military advisors who instead recommend the issuance of a general letter of reprimand to be inserted in current servicemen and servicewomen’s personnel files, with a penalty of the forfeiture of one week’s pay, and then offering each SOM service person an otherwise clean record and elimination of any pending charges (for nonviolent offenses, including insubordination) in exchange for an immediate return to duty.

The proponents of this liberal approach counter the howls of conservative protest that it is “a pusillanimous pandering to prurient pilfering of patriotic pulchritude” because it is not just a complete negation of the existing DADT policy, but its active antithesis. This liberal approach would accept openly gay troops henceforth. The popular advocates of this policy tout it as “pink patriotism” while the enraged opponents deride it as “poisonous pansy-ism.”

While the policy debate rages, U.S. military operations around the globe are in abeyance, and one immediate consequence of this lull is a dramatic drop in both military and civilian casualties in the various war zones and occupation zones manned (and ‘womanned’) by U.S. forces. Such casualties as have occurred this week seem to be simply due to the usual types of household and road accidents, and not armed conflict.

Unless the problem is solved quickly, the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere will not be able to proceed, and the entire thrust of U.S. foreign policy will collapse amid a hail of ridicule from around the world. The President warned that unless the U.S. military can overcome “this pink tide of emotional pacifism and interpersonal distraction” that “clouds our national resolve to maintain the rigor of our thrusts in many sensitive vital areas,” the United States “will disappoint our many partners, who want us behind them” in their struggles “to secure a satisfying state.”

Despite such concern, the collapse of U.S. war-fighting efforts has received a worldwide happy reaction. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department dismisses this initial overseas positive reaction as “no doubt due to a lack of understanding about the true meaning of the situation, and on sober reflection foreign governments and populations will soon realize how dire the situation will be for them unless the U.S. military can return to its traditional role and stabilizing activities around the world.”

The Israeli government as well as a number of Kings and presidents of nations in the Middle East echoed this concern, pointing to it as “the major security issue” for their administrations, though the government of Iran and the general popular sentiment “on the street” throughout the region remained “rapturously gay” on the subject, as characterized by the Iranian press.

In a recording sent to Arab language media, a spokesman for Al Qaeda said that their franchises would certainly be on the lookout for any “homo-erotic infection of our cadres by the degenerate Crusader occupiers” nearby, and they would be quick to behead any Al Qaeda member who exhibited “this disease from the West.” A Tea Party congressional member of the Military Affairs Committee, commenting on the Al Qaeda communiqué, agreed with the idea claiming “it would do a world of good for the U.S. military to enforce a similarly high standard of moral discipline.” However, a recent poll of likely U.S. voters shows them to be cool to the idea of firing squad executions for military personnel court-martialed for purple passion mutineering (PPM), with 49% opposed, 34% in favor and 17% undecided.

The purple passion pacifism (3P) crisis that has collapsed U.S. war-fighting capability is still unresolved tonight, and the world waits with bated breath to see what will transpire. Never has the fate of the world been so precipitously punctuated by such a precarious period pendulous with perilous possibilities. Professor Algernon Illingworth, a retired Oxford don and aging classicist, quipped to British television reporters that we were “witnessing an inversion of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.”

It was later reported that Illingworth was placed on a “no fly” list by U.S. anti-terrorism agencies, and a search was initiated for the operative code-named “Aristophanes Lysistrata” (dubbed “A-List” by the CIA, and who has not yet been identified but is expected to be detected soon and tracked by anti-terrorist imaging from space satellite, ATISS). Once identified, A-List’s web-purchasing accounts will be blocked to thwart terrorist activity. The work of freedom never rests.

Logically, it is pointless to vote for you, as I explained in 2008. But, public delusions and political pork barrel being perennially popular, you will no doubt retain your hold on the hopes of tens of millions nationally, which you will invariably continue to betray.

Clearly, it is your job to prod the reluctant rear of the herd into the same stockyard that your Republican partners lead the eager, stampeding front. It’s easy to see the attraction of this drive from the cowboys’ perspective: anticipating the camaraderie of a hearty feed on prime rib around the campfire, and pockets bulging with wages at the end of the drive. However, when given any thought, one has to concede that the attractions of the drive are lost to any members of the herd being driven. Fortunately for you, few in the herd think beyond chewing into the immediate satisfaction rubbing into their muzzles, so they usually serve their function as prime rib.

Much of the public has the mistaken belief that the purpose of political parties in the United States is to consolidate a set of broad consensus on national issues, such as the economy, the mechanics and economics of food production and distribution, the structure of national defense forces, and the implementation of social services: education, health, retirement and elder-care; so as to craft legislation that governs how these and other matters are to be dealt with for the public good.

It is amazing that such a mistaken and inverted view of reality could ever have become common. Of course, it is the parties that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government action, and the public whose purpose is to ensure that beneficence by supplying the labor and capital needed to implement government action (or inaction) mandated by the bipartisan directorate. For example, it is the public’s duty to:

• provide a mass base of unthinking public approval for the status quo, such as by voting for Democrats and Republicans only (and so helping decide the biannual and quadrennial local and national contests selecting which partner will be the respective pork barrel meister-in-chief for the term), by manning party and race rallies (to maintain public social disunity), and following directions en masse in the many sanctioned corporate-financed political campaigns;
• supply the living and future dead soldiers for the ongoing foreign wars;
• buy products and services as directed by the entertaining and instructional advertisements in major media;
• assume the tax burden necessary to underwrite the profitability of otherwise failing corporations, which profitability the bipartisan directorate deems to be a “national interest”;
• be an absorptive market for the waste production of national security industries (e.g., assume liability for civilian nuclear power; sustain the use of high-tech para-military cop equipment);
• sustain the operation of a wealth-based adjudication-prison system, a corporate-government partnership and punitive element of social control;
• support by every thought, word and deed the primacy of national security needs, as defined by the Pentagon and the bipartisan directorate, to the access of national resources over any selfish humanitarian or public social considerations (e.g., expending tax revenues — “emergency war supplemental” — to continue funding the bombardments in Central Asia and East Africa, instead of profitless subsidies for continuing unemployment benefits or a variety of public social services);
• remember that the nation is defined by its national security tasks framing its corporate financial capital essence, NOT by the massed and, by definition, petty concerns of its self-absorbed “rubber bumper” population.

At this time in U.S. history, the Republican Party commands the loyalties of those motivated by simple white Judeo-Christian supremacy, finance capital greed, and hegemonic US militarism. Humanitarian, cultural, artistic and environmental considerations are absent, except when seen as impediments. This is the mindset of social inertia supporting exploitation full speed ahead. The Democratic Party captures the hopes of people who want to live like Republicans, but want to think of themselves as nice. It is easy to see how minimal intellect presents few problems in maintaining a Republican mindset, yet how helpful intellectual agility can be for a Democrat, whose self-image can require considerable mental gymnastics to maintain. In both cases, the identification with a party is usually reduced to a habit, because most people try to minimize their amount of thinking (which is sad, because this popular lack of thought is a very useful lever exploited by the manipulators of social control).

So, Democrats tend to “reach out” to leftist political outcasts, presumed to be politically homeless without them (intentionally so, as the Democrats work to suppress “third” parties), in an effort to produce electoral majorities that will gain Democrats pork-barrel-dispensing seniority when in government. Of course, the purpose of the voter is to promote the interests of the party, and not vice versa; so after the electoral victory the leftist issues and vote-seducing party rhetoric are expeditiously excreted, to trim the party for its primary purpose of implementing its previously agreed upon corporate agenda.

One can be forgiven for being “used” or “fooled” and “disappointed” by such political exploitation once, but not multiply. If nothing else, then just self-respect demands one decide on what one really wants to vote for, and then stick to it. Vote for what you believe in. If a party does not act as you believe it should, then don’t vote for it. If you follow that simple rule (just stated twice), then you will never be “used” or “fooled” and “disappointed” by a political party or political campaign again.

People loyal to either the Republican or Democratic parties, and completely satisfied with the conditions of the United States and the world today, have a completely consistent position because they unambiguously support the bipartisan consensus that produced those conditions. If, like me, you do not like the current situation, domestically and internationally, then you can make a list of your priorities and use it to gauge the performance (NOT just rhetoric) of candidates and parties you could vote for (and campaigns and public interest groups you could join and work with). Let your allegiance follow your values, and not be shackled by habit nor fear (nor pork barrel) to any one political power club.

So, dear Democrats, in a public answer to your many mailed and e-mailed appeals for my money — oh, and yes, my vote — here is my list of what I am voting for, and which I will use to identify matching candidates: the people whose past performance suggests they are most likely to implement my political goals. You may quantify my loyalty to your party by its degree of coherence to these goals.

Checklist for 2012 and Beyond:

1) Safeguard the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund and its traditional use: no privatization of any kind, no diversion of funds ever.

2) End the Israel subsidies until Israel’s complete withdrawal (of its military and settlements) behind its 1967 borders with Gaza and the West Bank. Since it would be impossible to ensure that foreign aid money given to Israel for humanitarian purposes would not be surreptitiously diverted to the Israeli military and the Israeli settlement activity (land theft in Palestine), a complete ban on foreign aid would be necessary until verifiable Israeli compliance with the world consensus on international justice (codified in UN resolutions, its charter, conventions and reports) is achieved.

3) Prompt withdrawal of U.S. troops from their invasions and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stop military incursions elsewhere, and begin the process of substantially reducing the foreign deployment of U.S. troops on foreign bases (e.g., the complete evacuation from Okinawa — Japanese territory).

4) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and modernize it to deal with the 21st century electronic technology of banking and finance (the internet and computer networks). Bring back strict regulation of the banking industry, and also nationalize the Federal Reserve because the management of the nation’s currency is too important to be left to for-profit corporations.

5) Eliminate the Bush Tax cuts as only the first step to reintroducing fairness into the U.S. tax code: a reduction in personal income tax rates for incomes below $100,000/year, the taxing of capital gains like wage income, the elimination of offshore “tax haven” loopholes and special tax-exempting subsidies to businesses.

6) Repeal of the Patriot Act. Defending the nation should mean defending the civil rights of its people, not making it easier for hidden and unaccountable administrators to secretly select scapegoats and designate enemies-of-the-state from the national citizenry and world public.

7) Establish a national health-care system, a public “single-payer” all-living-souls-included system. If necessary, nationalize the entire insurance industry to do so; the maintenance of each human life is too important to be left to for-profit corporations. The savings to be gained by the retrenchment of the military (items 2 and 3) will easily cover the expense of managing a national health plan.

8) Repeal the “No Child Left Behind” abomination hypocritically pretending to improve the nation’s patchwork of primary public education systems. Establish a national kindergarten-to-college all-living-souls-included plan. Education is a right. The mental and character development of the nation’s children (that is to say, the children residing within the national territory at any given time) is too important to be left to for-profit corporations or local racist atavistic groups.

9) Remove patent protection from drugs and medical technology based on the results of publicly funded research. If tax dollars paid for the work to devise new types of medicines, or their enabling insights and mechanisms, then the public has a right to the health benefits of these advances, over any considerations of profits by private companies that seek to restrict and control such use. A similar principle should apply to the privatization of all publicly funded research, for example in physics, aviation, electronics, and materials science.

10) Fund the development and deployment of solar and sustainable energy sources and technologies; end fossil and fission fuel subsidies; develop the range of occupations (jobs) that would design, build and sustain a network of local and regional sub-networks of sustainable (solar, wind, hydro, geo-thermal, tidal and ocean) energy generation and distribution (of short-range and low-loss).

There are other issues I would like to see action on, but let’s start with these.

“It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money.” — George W. Bush, stump speeches, 2000.

“I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care).

Character Is Fate (Heraclitus/Novalis)

The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.

Don’t think this last generalization too extreme. Rare are the people who are as unconcerned about their survival and possessions as were Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek “cynic” philosopher of the 4th century BC, and Ryōkan Taigu (1758-1831), the hermit Zen monk poet and calligrapher. Similarly, rare are the people, without organic brain disorders, who do not have some fear of being made fools of when matching wits with more polished, more educated, more experienced, more charismatic or simply a luckier class of people. Lastly, we are all racists. As highly evolved monkeys, we instinctively identify with our monkey troop of people with similar appearance, existential outlook, language, culture, place of origin, the economic neighborhood we imagine we deserve a place in, and the socio-political fantasy we have been imprinted with and trained to take as the thread of history that expresses us.

As we become more self-aware, more experienced and better educated, we can see through many of the racist concepts and attitudes of the past. But it is self-deception to imagine that we have ever individually “gone beyond racism” in our visceral responses to the instants of daily life that erupt before us, or that we will never have a sudden emotion, thought or fear that is completely above the muck of primordial racist reaction. It is intellectual pride, and false, to assume we can consciously will ourselves to transcend the psychological reactions of our paleo-mammalian brains. Instead, it is psychologically much healthier to realize that our common human nature assures that any behavior humanly possible, remains humanly possible for each of us as well.

C. G. Jung made this point about Nazism, that those people least likely to act like Nazis and Nazi collaborators were those who knew they had no special immunity to Nazi psychology (not assuming they were too “intellectual”, “moral”, or “religious” to be swayed), but instead actively countered its influences to their behavior. A similar attitude operating out of the cerebral cortex is needed to manage the unthinking motivations arising out of our deeper-set limbic system, our reptilian brain. Racism is a burst of raw emotional energy whose emergence is to be detected and redirected intelligently, while within the individual.

People whose self-awareness, of the type described, are weak and under-developed and can be manipulated more easily. “There’s a sucker born every minute” (pre-1898, attribution uncertain). People who are keenly aware of this psychology, and devoid of moral principles, like the fictional Elmer Gantry and the all-too-real Joseph Goebbels, can manage the herding of a mass of people to give up their power — in every sense of the word — to a driving elite. The few rule the many by persuasion. The levers of direction are the popular flaws of character.

We The People

In theory, the many governments (federal, state and local) in the United States of America are democracies: assemblies of elected representatives of populations of citizens, and officials appointed by the elected representatives to execute specific tasks in the public interest. In this model, government is the apparatus designed to implement the popular consensus about the management of the shared material existence of the citizenry.

Identifying and prioritizing the specifics of the popular will are supposedly accomplished by the concentrating and winnowing effects of competitive electioneering and parliamentary debate. The regulation of markets and trade, the upkeep of public infrastructure, the provision of emergency services against natural disasters, and the prudent maintenance of defense forces are all examples of publicly shared concerns governments are created to manage. The education of children till they reach adulthood, intellectual maturity and a self-sustaining professional competence, as well as the health care of the citizenry are enduring publicly shared concerns that are ideally suited for management by functionally dedicated government apparatuses.

When Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was saying that we, the people, were the problem since our government is the democratic abstraction of our shared existence. So if we are “the problem,” then whose problem is this? Why would “our” President disown the apparatus of our common will, whose implementation he had been entrusted to lead? Certainly, one could understand “our” President saying that there were problems in the government apparatus limiting its responsiveness to our needs, and effectiveness in achieving our goals: “my purpose as your President is solving the problems our government has in meeting all its obligations to the public.” Note however, this last quote is fictional.

On the 20th of January, 1981, the new President of the United States was telling us that “we the people” were in somebody’s way, a somebody who actually was represented by the power and authority he now held, and which he intended to use to destroy the deposed government that was “us.” A coup. In the light of subsequent history, a reasonable characterization. Twenty-nine years and one day after Ronald Reagan came to power, the U.S. Supreme Court made it plain, by issuing its Dred Scott decision of the 21st century, elevating corporate rights above those of individual flesh-and-blood human beings. Now, every legally recognized person — real or corporate — is equally entitled to spend as much as they have to influence political debate. Clearly, because political access is so precious, it must be metered out on the basis of wealth.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” (Anatole France: Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault 1844-1924)

“It is true that liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed.” (Attributed to Lenin: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870-1924)

Yes, we, the people, are certainly in somebody’s way, unless our consumption, labor or demise lards a corporate bottom line. Think of yourself as a unit in a statistical ensemble of metabolic form virtual property, an advanced concept of slavery that transcends the 13th Amendment and the unitary static materialist concept of the lump-of-flesh slave; a human herd whose collective activity in a spectrum of markets exudes profitability like the methane clouds that flatulate up from bovine concentrations. The free market system strikes a match to the gas, charges you for the heat and leaves you with the ashes, if not a scorched rump. We are herded by the owners of the markets we are counted in.

One example is health care; our medical needs are not the prime concern, but instead preserving the profits of the parasitic medical financing business carried on by the insurance industry, which is interposed between medical providers and patients. So our medical market owners, the insurance industry, must herd us to its best advantage, not ours. When we, the people, try to fashion a public health care system that does meet our needs, by cutting out the middleman (the essence of good business practice), we immediately find that “government is the problem.” In fact, democracy is the problem. If democracy is not strictly rationed, the whole herd might stampede and any number of markets tossed over and sunk, like the bales of tea dropped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.

It’s All About The Money

When George W. Bush said “It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money” during his campaign speeches in 2000, he was broadcasting coded programming language designed to activate resentment over personal inadequacies and have the resulting shame-based anger projected onto a victim population. The purpose of such social programming is to train the indoctrinated population to maintain its unthinking visceral obedience to the directing ideology, and so provide political support to an oligarchy that simply exploits its trained masses shamelessly.

When you hear people say “I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care), you hear the internalized programming. With blissful obliviousness these political automatons will allow their economy to wither, and dispatch their tax dollars to fund the gold-plated war-waste of the Pentagon system and the many outrageous corporate subsidies (“bonuses”) that remain protected by the “tax cuts” that are so liberal to corporate wealth, so measly for the suckers, but do bump those “welfare cheats” off the dole most satisfactorily to both the duped and the malevolent.

The great con-job here is in training a large population into accepting that property has more rights than people. Since under democracy there is always the threat that popular consensus could place some restrictions on “property” (the “right” of money to do as it pleases), then property — as it is understood today: wealth protected by the legalistic über-persona of corporate structure — must destroy democracy. Democracy is communism.

A History Of Social Control

How did the corporate ideology social programmers manage to peel back a million years of human evolution to produce the “Tea Party” sideshows where people act at their limbic level, like monkey troops howling over the invasion of their banana groves? Let’s skip through history to piece together an answer.

The European white man used a divide-and-rule strategy to control the native populations of the many countries he colonized in the Western Hemisphere, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East. Tribal rivalries stoked by the white overlords could keep the natives distracted from coordinating a united opposition to colonialism. Selected native groups and individuals could be educated and trained to become the local managers and enforcers of the white man’s rule. They internalized the white man’s culture up to a point, sufficient they hoped to “elevate” them out of native society and into some respectable place in the white man’s social hierarchy, and along with that add to their wealth and prestige. These were the compradors, native-born agents of colonial interests in Asia, and the native troops deployed by white colonial management to control the native masses. Successors in the role of native collaborators with white social control are the racial and ethnic tokens deployed by U.S. corporate and political management today; some are quite polished, prominent, and well-paid.

The management of today’s masses in the United States evolved out of the mechanisms for managing the natives that began with Christopher Columbus and the European Conquest of the Americas. Native and slave management in early colonial times evolved into race management after the Civil War, and then to the economic and social class management of the present day. The entire mentality of social control is that of colonialism.

The most significant Civil Rights legislation since the end of the Civil War was enacted during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (Democratic Party):

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (extended voting rights and outlawed racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public),
• The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had caused the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans),
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the “Fair Housing Act” prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing).

The combined tensions of desperation by white racists at losing overt social control, and the pent up rage of blacks over the slow pace of authentic relief of oppression and the opening of economic opportunities, erupted into many urban riots during the 1960s. Very prominent ones were: the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles; the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit; and the 125 cities that erupted into riot during April and May of 1968 in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4th.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon (Republican Party) used a “Southern Strategy”, a “law and order” play on Southern white racist resentment, to win the presidential election. Johnson likely assumed that Civil Rights legislation would bring a flood of black votes to the Democrats nationally, and perhaps compensate somewhat for the certain loss of Southern white racist votes; but, blacks are only about 12% of the population, and Nixon counted on there being more than 12% white racist resentment within the 75% white population — both in the South and nationally. He won by a landslide.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tapped into the submerged bigotry that exists coast-to-coast, to call forth the resentful inner white Southerner (the inner Confederate) within much of the national electorate, and win the presidency. Reagan’s managers had learned from Nixon, and devised an expanded form of the Southern Strategy.

During George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign (as well as his two terms in office) economic class and “race” code words were euphemisms for each other. The decoded programming message was: poor and unworthy people, like wasteful and lazy blacks, and dirty and ignorant Mexican (Latino) immigrants are taking “your” (deserving inner whites’) money by creating social welfare burdens that “your” government is now forced to pay, because of bad “give-away” legislation foisted on it by wrong-headed liberals (white snobs and non-white agitators). Your undeserved (because of your inner whiteness) increasing poverty is directly attributable to the drain on taxes by these unworthy, non-white-centered, strange-language populations. In voting for George W. Bush (and obeying his managing oligarchy), you put money “back” into the pockets of people like you, who deserve it.

All the language publicly broadcast by “conservatives” is pure lying to induce visceral obedience to the corporatist oligarchy’s political control, and allow it to continue bleeding the public like a swarm of elephant-sized ticks. Following are generalized decodings of the core instructions and their imprinted reflection.

The Hypnotic Message (“watch the watch…”):

You lack… stuff (money, brains, looks, youth, education, a nice location, a desirable mate, successful children), so you resent paying for others who get it free; others who are inferior, threatening, strange, unclean, unwholesome, wasteful, disrespectful of your importance (as a real American), and of your precedence in “our” traditional system of social rank. You resent these others polluting and degrading the system you expect to provide for you, to profit you, to honor you, to hold still and not progress beyond your capacity to understand, and to preserve the order of social rewards so no unworthy others pass you by and push you back.

You must fight back, don’t let them have free things which your work has paid for, don’t let them have advantages that makes it easier for them to advance ahead of you, and makes it harder for you to maintain your superiority without learning anything new, without becoming smarter or richer on your own. Don’t let these others have advantages that crowd the places you expect to occupy as you move on in life; crowd them with more unwholesome unworthy competitors, whose increasing number threaten to diminish your standing, and end your way of life.

The Internalized Message:

I lack stuff, and it is these unclean others who have degraded the system that previously would have moved me up faster and more comfortably. So I want to exclude these others, keep them from crossing “our” borders, and taking our advantages without paying as much as I did; even worse, creating problems my tax dollars have to pay for and which wouldn’t even happen if those people weren’t here, so I would have more of my own wealth. I have to stand up for the people like me who run for office and are willing to get the government to take care of the real Americans, who deserve the benefits that they paid for, and their parents and grandparents paid for; that will push out the unclean ones and ensure there are no extra moochers sapping our wealth, and bringing me down. Because I lack stuff, I don’t want to pay for other people to have stuff, and because I don’t want the government to take more of my money, I’m voting for the people who want to cut down the government, and cut down taxes. I’m voting to stop the give-aways, because the politicians who will do that care about me, a real American who makes a real contribution to the country, and deserves not to have it pissed away on wasteful others.

And so are fools serenaded into the abattoir.

This ruling “dismayed lawmakers and public interest groups that fought for decades to limit the influence of wealthy special interests in politics.” But voices for those interests expressed satisfaction with the success of their tactic of arguing against the ban in court on the grounds it was contrary to the First Amendment, because it was government control of free speech in election campaigns.

The new ruling specifically applies to federal elections, however it is certain to be used as the basis of new lawsuits aimed at overturning state laws, which limit corporate spending to influence state and local elections.

Speaking for the court’s majority (with Alioto, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia), Justice Anthony Kennedy equated corporate and labor union spending on elections to free speech, which needed constitutional protection: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.’’

The ruling also eviscerates the “McCain-Feingold” election campaign finance reform law of 2002, by removing the ban on corporate and union-sponsored “issue ads’’ in the waning days of a campaign. The court left unchanged the dollar limits for contributions to candidates by individuals and political action committees, preserving a fig leaf of respectability against the appearance of bribery.

Justice John Paul Stevens issued a spirited dissent (joined by Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor), saying the majority had committed a grave error in equating corporate speech to that of human beings: “The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind… and selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.” The definition of paid media as political free speech is corrupted by the inherent disproportion of wealth, people who can invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.”

From the perspective of public good, the fatal flaw here is as Justice Stevens acknowledged: “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment,” in many prior Supreme Court decisions.

Indeed, the ideal remedy would be federal legislation — ideally as a constitutional amendment — defining “personhood” as solely the property of individual living human beings, and specifically not so for any corporate entity. Thus, corporations would be stripped of 1st, 5th and 14th Amendment rights. In brief, these Amendments define:

(1st) freedom of: religion, speech, the press, assembly; and freedom to petition;

(5th) indictments, due process, self-incrimination, double jeopardy, eminent domain;

(14th) citizenship.

The pernicious effect of allowing corporations 1st and 14th Amendment rights — hence, the right to lobby Congress — is evident today in the many distortions of government and public institutions to the detriment of the public good: ‘pork barrel nation.’

Corporations can often be far wealthier than individual citizens, and thus capable of buying far more power (of any and every kind) to prevail in any contest with a human adversary. Also, corporations can outlive a normal human lifetime, and so have a temporal advantage over actual humans: corporations can use delay till a human contender’s money is spent, or life expended. Of course, the best insurance for corporations is to use the wealth invested in them, and their possibly superhuman lifetimes, to acquire dominating political influence so as to shape the government and the laws to their particular economic advantage.

Corporations combine superhuman attributes for potential wealth accumulation and longevity, with the subhuman attribute of lacking an immediately responsible actor to be held accountable for the consequences of corporate actions. This combination is an affront to the very concept we actual human “persons” have of our individual selves, and it should not be equated with human reality in the laws devised to regulate human society.

People have human rights and they have property rights, but property itself has no rights; it is by definition not-human (the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; property is stuff and livestock). People can form private clubs of pooled property — corporations — because these are profitable ways of engaging in commerce. But, by bending law to debase the definition of a human being so as to bestow “personhood” on pooled property clubs, we dehumanize society:

• by allowing inhuman combines with superhuman attributes to overpower the interests of many individual people; and

• by bestowing an often complete immunity from the hazard of personal responsibility, to the humans directing and profiting from corporate actions.

In brief: people have rights and property does not; and accumulated property does not shield the individual from responsibility for the consequences of their acts.

We take each of these principles to disqualify corporations from legal consideration as “persons.” Let the living and breathing persons in corporations carry what personhood is claimed for such entities, and let those corporate people equally well carry the accountability that each and every other individual in the nation’s public shoulders as their defining social responsibility.

The Supreme Court justices promoting this decision knew exactly what they were doing, and why. Behind the display of magisterial solemnity and jurisprudential weight, these justices know — deep down — they are just elements of a much larger machine, they are only where they are because of who they really serve.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

Indeed, with corporations now freed from restraints on their propaganda spending and lobbying, the sanctity of their ‘personhood’ protected by the First Amendment, we can certainly expect the floodgates of censorship to burst, allowing a torrent of accurate, diverse and trustworthy information to wash away all trace of control on personal thought and public discourse, and to enhance the actual people’s “freedom to think for ourselves.”

The impetus for developing this new generation of airliners is the need to improve fuel economy so as to maintain the profitability of the passenger air transport industry. Between 1986 and 2001, the world price of crude oil remained steady at near $22 a barrel. From 2002 to 2008, the world price of crude oil rose steadily from $25 to $95 a barrel (the prices quoted are rough averages, and in 2007 dollars). Modern airliners that are lighter and stronger than their older-generation all-metal size equivalents can carry more payload with less fuel consumption, and this translates to economic sustainability.

The quest for a more efficient airliner began with the first example of the type, Igor Sikorsky’s S-22 of 1913, the Ilya Muromets, a four engine biplane with an enclosed cabin for 16 passengers. Russia’s military needs in WW1 swallowed up the commercial potential of the S-22, and the production was shifted to bombers. The post-war rebirth of commercial aviation began with the Farman twin engine biplane transport of 1919, the F-60 Goliath, seating 14 passengers. Since then the quest for “better, faster and cheaper” passenger aviation has never stopped.

In 1972, Airbus introduced its A300, the first twin turbofan widebody air transport. The Boeing Commercial Airplanes company introduced its first widebody twin turbofan airliner, the 767, in 1981. Airbus chooses to be an airplane manufacturer that leads the industry in the application of engineered materials (composites) and computer-controlled aviation. Boeing is an airplane manufacturer that seeks to maintain its reputation for robust, reliable and increasingly efficient designs, which it gained early in its history with airplanes like the revolutionary 247 of 1933, the first truly modern airliner (all-aluminum monoplane of semi-monocoque construction with cantilever wings, wing flaps, retracting landing gear, trim tabs, autopilot, and deicing boots for the wings and tailplane).

Airbus and Boeing are today’s main competitors for new airplane orders worldwide. As noted earlier, it is the cost of fuel that drives the economics of commercial air transport, and in turn the replacement of older aircraft with newer models. The competing demands of safety, reliability, strength, carrying capacity, volumetric efficiency, speed and fuel economy drive airplane designers toward a convergence of characteristics, so that today both Airbus and Boeing airliners look, sound and feel largely the same to most passengers.

Each iteration of a manufacturer’s model type will have a higher proportion of weight-saving composite material, and a more extensive array of electronic and computer systems. How and where composites and computers are used by Airbus and Boeing may be quite different between their competing models of comparable type, but inevitably both manufacturers increase their use of both composites and computers, to remain competitive. The Airbus A330 and A340 series of airplanes, introduced in 1992 and 1993, and their classmate the Boeing 777, introduced in 1995, will be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, set for introduction in 2010, and the Airbus A350, set for introduction in 2013. Both the 787 Dreamliner and the A350 are nearly all-composite airplanes. The 787 Dreamliner is 80% composite by volume, and by weight it is: 50% composite, 20% aluminum, 15% titanium, 10% steel and 5% other. By weight, the A350 is: 53% composite, 19% aluminum and aluminum-lithium, 14% titanium, 6% steel and 8% other.

The challenge facing the civil aviation industries today is to answer the questions raised by the mysterious loss of Air France Flight 447, and to convince the public that any problems that may be uncovered about the use of composites and computers in AF447 will be fully understood and solved before building and flying all-composite airliners with even more complicated computerized control systems.

So, it is no wonder that Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney defended electronic flight control technology and the Airbus A330, in an interview prior to the Paris Air Show: “The causes of the [AF447] accident are unknown, and I don’t think there is any link with a serious fault with the aircraft…the A330 is a reliable and proven aircraft.”¹

The AF447 crisis in civil aviation may be similar to that of the two de Havilland Comet crashes of 1954. The Comet, introduced in 1949, was the world’s first passenger jet transport. During both January and April of 1954, de Havilland Comet airplanes broke apart at altitude while flying in clear weather over water. After the second crash, the fleet was grounded, many pieces were recovered from the seabed to assemble partial reconstructions, and many tests were conducted on another intact airframe. The cause of spontaneous disintegration was eventually found to be metal fatigue in the aluminum alloy used for the skin, by the cumulative effect of many cycles of cabin pressurization and de-pressurization.

The changes in design, materials and manufacturing techniques needed to solve the problems of the de Havilland Comets of 1949-1954 were used to produce an improved Comet, which returned de Havilland to passenger aviation in 1958. However, those same lessons had already been divined by Boeing to produce the 707, their first commercial jet transport, which was also introduced in 1958 and immediately went on to dominate passenger air transport through the 1960s.

If the air transport industries fail to fully resolve the AF447 mystery, then a portion of the public will assign an apprehensive image to the coming generation of composite computer-controlled air transports, a psychology we could think of as “’54 Comet dread,” as opposed to “’60s 7-0-7 optimism.”

AF447 In The Clouds

In the early pre-dawn hours (~2:15 UTC) of 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris fell out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean near the equator about midway between Brazil and Senegal, with the loss of all 228 people aboard. The aircraft was one of the most modern, a dual engine Airbus A330-200.

(UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, which replaced Greenwich Mean Time in 1964 and is defined for the time zone straddling much of 0 degrees longitude. There are 24 time zones each generally of 15 degrees longitude, but there are numerous deviations of time zone boundaries.)²

The accident occurred after the airplane had flown over 90% of its planned northeast-directed transect of 227 km through the width at mid length of a mesoscale convection system (MCS), a cluster of storms 800 km long east to west, and 160 km wide north to south.³

The last radio message from the crew of AF447 was a routine notification at 1:33 UTC that the flight at 35,000 feet (10,671 m) along oceanic high altitude route UN873 had reached waypoint INTOL, near the outer boundary of airspace monitored by radar from Brazil. The pilots of AF447 expected to reach waypoint TASIL, near the edge of airspace radar-monitored from Senegal, in 50 minutes (by 2:23 UTC), a distance of 663 km between waypoints. A mid Atlantic gap of at least 500 km exists between the limits of Brazilian and Senegalese air traffic radar surveillance.⁴

Between about 1:46 UTC to 1:56 UTC, AF447 flew through the western fringe of the top of a storm that reached to between 35,000 feet (10.67 km) and 40,000 feet (12.2 km). It seems AF447 had shifted somewhat to the left, or westward, from its planned flightpath in order to avoid the brunt of this storm, and in anticipation of weaving between storm cells ahead. Thunderstorms in the tropics are usually very localized, of short duration, and produce abundant rainfall. They can develop so quickly that a Paris-bound flight 4 hours out from Rio de Janeiro might encounter an active storm cell over a patch of ocean that had been cloudless prior to takeoff. This is why airplane weather radar had been developed, to alert pilots of weather threats ahead, and to guide their weaving between active storm cells when they became unavoidably embedded in weather systems with numerous storms. After crossing about 42 km of clear airspace, AF447 entered the main MCS thunderstorm cluster, at about 1:59 UTC.

A sequence of satellite images of the MCS cluster show the large 800 km by 160 km (roughly) cloud mass with its variegated edge, drifting, evolving and fragmenting during that day. These images show the merged shape seen from above of the laterally spreading “anvil” tops of the many individual storm cells in the cluster. The updrafts in these cells had sufficient energy to push moisture up to between 40,000 feet (12.2 km) to 56,000 feet (17.1 km). Moisture that rises into the base of MCS clouds, perhaps near 3281 feet (1 km) at 20 C (68 F), can be chilled by strong updrafts to arrive at -40 C (-40 F) at the 10.67 km cruising altitude of AF447, and continue rising and chilling to as low a temperature as -80 C (-112 F) at 17 km elevation. This storm cluster was typical, not unusual, for the location and time of year.

AF447 proceeded northeast through the MCS cluster, guided by its weather (moisture, rain, hale) radar along a corridor of mild radar reflectivity (and of anticipated least relative ‘storminess’), about equidistant between a strong cell to the west and the strongest cell of the moment, which was about 30 km east. About 8 minutes after entering the MCS system (2:07 UTC), AF447 began penetrating what was probably the most energetic part of the storm cluster along its flightpath.

At 2:10 UTC, the first of a series of automated signals was sent by AF447′s onboard computerized maintenance system, via satellite, to Air France computers in Paris logging maintenance information. The series of automated messages had a combined time span of 1 minute and occurred until 2:14 UTC; 5 failure reports and 19 warnings were transmitted. The earliest automated messages reported on the failure of the Pitot Tube sensors, which measure the airspeed of the airliner and provide an estimate of altitude based on the static pressure of the atmosphere. Subsequent messages in the initial burst indicated that the auto-pilot (automatic ‘steering’) and auto-thrust (automatic ‘gas pedal’) systems had been disengaged, the collision avoidance system (to detect other nearby airliners) had a fault, that the flight control computers (three for redundancy) had shifted to an “alternate” mode where they made fewer automatic adjustments to the airplane’s control surfaces, and placed fewer limits on the range of manual inputs by the pilots that would be implemented as motions of the control surfaces (ailerons, rudder and the many types of flaps).⁵

From 2:11 UTC to 2:14 UTC, messages indicated the failure of the gyroscopes (air data inertial reference system, ADIRU, used to provide the artificial horizon orienting the sense of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ and ‘level,’ essential during nighttime) and resulting faults in the instrument panel displays (screens and electronic images instead of mechanical dial gauges); there was disagreement between systems that interpreted air data (such as for airspeed and angle of attack of the wings into the airflow); that a fault had occurred in the flight control computer system (that transmits commands to the hydraulic actuators that physically move control surfaces); that a fault had occurred in the computer system that captures and processes pressure and electrical outputs from air and motion sensors that supply data; and finally, a “cabin vertical speed warning” indicating a rapid loss of cabin air pressure, due to either a rapid descent or a breaching of the cabin shell.

AF447 may have entered its period of most severe jolting, buffeting and external cooling near 2:07 UTC, when it began crossing the core of the MCS cluster between its most active cells. Some as yet unknown excessive structural strain — perhaps exacerbated by material embrittlement or loss of plasticity and cohesion due to excessive cooling, such as by micro-strains induced by the expansion of trapped moisture freezing inside composite materials — may have been delivered by turbulence and initiated the subsequent fragmentation of the aircraft.

Pressure sensor icing sustained during at least the three minutes prior to 2:10 UTC seems to have initiated the cascade of air data (speed, pressure, altitude and attitude) processing and instrumentation failures, and contributed to the growing uncertainty of the decision-making electronic processing for the navigation and flight control systems.

Pilots rank their priorities during flight, especially in emergencies, as: “aviate, navigate, communicate.” The pilots of AF447 would be working first to keep their airplane at a proper speed: fast enough to stay aloft at the given elevation and weight of the airplane, and not too fast to damage the structure because of excessive pressure differences produced by airflows near the speed of sound, and by excessive structural stresses induced by the alternating jolts of updrafts and downdrafts in turbulent air spaces. Given that the aircraft remains aloft and is not being rattled to pieces, the next priority is to point it in a safe direction, for example away from active thunderstorm cells, and along the best route to a safe landing. The third priority is to communicate the status of the flight to air traffic controllers, a useful task as long as it is not a distraction from essential aviating.

Troubleshooting a torrent of error messages from a computerized flight control system to then compose a radio report for air traffic controllers is not a sensible allocation of attention during an emergency to control an airliner in a storm. We can understand why the crew of AF447 might not send any radio messages during their 3 minutes (and possibly as much as 11 minutes) of weaving between the storm cells and riding the waves of turbulence, before the first automated alarm of trouble was transmitted at 2:10 UTC. At this point, AF447 had crossed 154 km of the MCS cluster, the last 42 km of which were probably the roughest. During the next 4 minutes, when the automated messages were sent, the flight probably travelled 56 km. At 2:14 UTC, AF447 was about 2 to 3 minutes (28 km to 42 km, at 14 km/minute) from exiting the northern edge of the MCS cloud system, and it sent its last transmission.

AF447 Into The Sea

The search for AF447 began at 2:23 UTC. Brazilian air traffic controllers called their Senegalese counterparts when they failed to receive the expected confirmation that AF447 had announced itself to Senegal by radio, as required upon entry to a new airspace. The Brazilian Air Force dispatched search planes, a Spanish maritime patrol plane searched southwest from the Cape Verde Islands, and the search effort quickly expanded in the following days to include Brazilian naval vessels, cargo ships within the search area, French military planes and ships, and satellites.⁶

Fernando de Noronha is an archipelago of 21 islands 354 km (220 miles) northeast from the eastern tip of Brazil. AF447 flew past (~1:18 UTC) and to the west of Fernando de Noronha on route to waypoint INTOL at 565 km (351 miles) from the coast. At about 2:44 UTC, the pilots of a TAM Airlines flight from Europe to Brazil reported observing “orange dots” on the surface of the ocean — burning wreckage? — when they were approximately 1300 km (808 miles) from Fernando de Noronha. This would put them about 515 km (320 miles) northeast of the last known position of AF447, 30 minutes after its last transmission.

If AF447 broke apart at 2:14 UTC, some wreckage might fall as far as 130 km from this location (an estimate based on the debris scatter from China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747 that broke apart at 35,000 feet in 2002). Powered flight by AF447 beyond 2:14 UTC was unlikely since there were no subsequent automated messages (presumably, all power generation, controlled motion and thrust had ceased). If the “orange dots” were burning AF447 wreckage, then the TAM pilots had the ability to see glows no less than 380 km ahead of them. So, the “orange dots” sighting is probably unrelated.

The Brazilian Air Force spotted floating debris 650 km (404 miles) northeast of Fernando de Noronha on 2 June, the next day a Brazilian Navy patrol boat arrived in the area. On 6 June, bodies and debris from AF447 were recovered. On 8 June, the vertical stabilizer and rudder of the Airbus A330-200 was found and recovered.⁷

By 26 June, when the search for human remains ended, 51 bodies and 600 pieces of debris had been recovered from two debris fields about 80 km (50 miles) apart on the surface of the ocean. The finds were concentrated along a 150 km track almost due north from the last known position of AF447; debris (but apparently not bodies) was scattered as far as 50 km east and west of this track. The tendency of flat pieces of debris to glide haphazardly as uncontrolled airfoils would scatter them much further from the last heading of the airplane than more compact objects, which developed no aerodynamic lift.⁸

Autopsies revealed the victims to have fractured limbs and hips, no seawater in their lungs, no signs of burning or charring, and some had little or no clothing. The presumptions are that AF447 broke up at altitude without a fuel explosion causing a cabin fire, that the victims were ejected from the wreckage at high altitude, which sucked out their breath and quickly made them unconscious, that the high speed air blast tore off their clothing, and that their bodies were not fragmented on hitting the sea because they fell more slowly individually than if they had been attached to a much heavier mass like a wrecked fuselage.

An explosion and fire in the lower fuselage (below the floor of the passenger cabin, in the center fuel tank or the cargo holds) cannot be ruled out because the passengers would be shielded from such a blast and fire, and the airplane still disintegrate in flight. Recovery of a sufficient number of parts from the lower fuselage will resolve the question of fire (no evidence yet). The recovery of parts has so far been restricted to those that float, so a great deal of plastic and composite material, and not so much metal.⁹

The official investigators are anxious to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder (the “black boxes” which are actually orange), which lie somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. To help locate them, each is equipped with a sonic emitter (“pinger”) with a range of 2 km. The sea floor is between 2.5 km and 4 km deep below the suspected crash site, and is quite mountainous since it is close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the boundary from which tectonic plates originate and spread eastward and westward). The recorder cases can withstand pressure down to a depth of 6 km, and the pingers are designed to operate for at least 30 days, after which their signals fade.

Questions And Speculations

The sequence of known events for AF447 has been laid out in the sections above. The distances and UTC times quoted are either from news accounts or my simple calculations, which do not account for factors such as the curvature of the Earth and headwinds, which pilots, navigators and meteorologists use to arrive at precise numbers. Unless Airbus can make a more detailed analysis of AF447′s automated messages, and until more parts of the airplane are recovered and analyzed, especially the voice and data recorders, we are left without more facts. So, now we ask 5 questions and speculate.

Question 1. AF447 flew into a line of thunderstorms and was destroyed. Is this a case of pilot error?

The ranking for safety of nine modes of transportation on the basis of deaths per billion journeys (the basis of insurance rates) is: bus (4.3), rail (20), van (20), car (40), foot (40), water (90), air (117), bicycle (170), motorcycle (1640).¹⁰

The primary causes for the complete loss of commercial jet aircraft in accidents during 1996 through 2005 were found to be the: flight crew (55%), airplane (17%), weather (13%), miscellaneous other (7%), air traffic control (5%), maintenance (3%).¹¹

Airline travelers demand rapid transit across vast distances with the punctuality of well-run train services. They also crave comfort, meal services and entertainment during their trips. Personal safety and incident-free travel are usually taken for granted, but highly prized when thought about. And, passengers want it all cheap. Everything about passenger airplane design and airline operations is focused on producing this type of experience for the flying public. An accident like that of AF447 is simply an unpleasant reminder that nature may not always be as conveniently benign as we had assumed and planned for in the design of our passenger airplanes and the operations of our air travel industry. Our margins may be too thin because we are in too much of a hurry, and too cheap.

Passenger airplanes are designed to withstand forces comparable to about 2 to 2.5 times their maximum loaded weight (2 to 2.5 times their total mass times the constant of gravitational acceleration, g = 9.81 meters per second-squared). We could design passenger airplanes that are essentially unbreakable, like the F-35 fighter now under development, which can be stressed to 8 or 9 g, and uses composite materials for its wing and nacelle skins. However, ‘unbreakable’ passenger airplanes would be much smaller and slower than the 200-500 seat turbofan-propelled transports we are used to. They would be more like the Lockheed P-3 Orion that has been used as a “hurricane hunter,” flying through violent storms to gather meteorological data. The P-3 Orion (1962-1990) is a maritime patrol plane developed from the Lockheed Electra passenger airplane (1957-1961), which could carry about 120 people. The four engine turboprop P-3 Orion has an operational limit of 3 g, but the plane was shown to survive a 7 g stall recovery in 2008; see the photo of the wing.¹²

Compare the photo of the overstressed P-3 Orion wing to photos of a recovered spoiler (wing flap) from the AF447 airplane.¹³

We could restrict air travel to times and routes of guaranteed clear weather, but then direct flights between Brazil and Europe would be impossible because planes would be barred from crossing the approximately 700 km wide Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a permanent band of thunderstorms that circles the globe near the equator. Flights are often grounded or diverted to alternate destinations when dangerous weather develops, but neither the flying public nor the airline operators are eager to expand this practice to the point of avoiding any possibility of contact with rain, snow, ice, lightning, turbulent air and birds.

So, on the basis of accepted practice, the Captain of AF447, Marc Dubois, did not make an error to set off on his fateful flight. It remains to be determined if he and his two assisting pilots made the right decisions in maneuvering the airplane through the atmospheric conditions they encountered, and in responding to the technical problems that erupted.

There are three possibilities of root causes here: human error, systemic error, or natural catastrophe. If the pilots made mistakes, then the information on the voice cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder will probably reveal them (if the recorders can be found). If the piloting was flawless, then the accident could be a systemic failure, a result of inadequacies in: airplane performance, design, maintenance, certification (the performance and safety standards we choose to adhere to, through government regulation), and the operational practices of the air travel industry.

The third possibility, that an unusual and rogue natural force overwhelmed AF447 and could not have been anticipated, lets humanity off the hook. The current best guess for an AF447 natural catastrophe is wind shear, a large and abrupt change in wind velocity experienced in crossing an invisible plane through the atmosphere. But this excuse is weak. Wind shear produced by the updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms is now monitored by onboard Pulse-Doppler weather radar. Clear air turbulence (CAT) is a form of cloudless wind shear that is difficult to avoid because it cannot be detected visually nor with radar (a laser range-finding and reflectivity-measuring system called Doppler LIDAR is needed). CAT is created near the four high-altitude jet streams that ring the earth, in the wind shadows of mountain peaks, and as the wake turbulence of large airplanes. AF447 was far from all of these.

The Captain of AF447 was 58 and had 21 years of piloting for Air France. He had undoubtedly flown Airbus planes between Rio de Janeiro and Paris many times. On the 31st of May, he probably saw nothing unusual in the weather predicted along his route (see Figure 4 in Reference 3, and the associated maps of higher elevation winds). He expected the usual thunderstorms near the equator and would be sure to monitor his weather radar during flight, to adjust his course as needed to evade active storm cells that might develop along his intended track.

The northern hemisphere’s trade winds move southwest, and the southern hemisphere’s trade winds move northwest; they converge in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The converged masses of heavily laden moist air then rise to great height (17 km) before diverging into a northward flow north of the equator, and southward flow south of the equator. These high-altitude flows toward higher latitudes sink to low elevation at 30 degrees north and south latitude, and then skim along the surface of the Earth westward and toward the equator, as the trade winds. These toroidal patterns of atmospheric circulation are called Hadley Cells. The ocean regions of the ITCZ were called “the doldrums” by early European mariners because of the typical absence of surface winds. The tropical heat and vertical trend of atmospheric circulation within the ITCZ continuously spawns thunderstorms, and these can group into squall lines or clusters now called mesoscale convection systems (MCS). The updrafts in these storms can reach 17 km, well past the usual 10-11 km cruising altitude of airliners. Pilots experienced at transoceanic flight, like those of AF447, would understand the nature of the air spaces they intended to cross, and plan accordingly.

At least 12 other airplanes passed through the area of AF447′s disappearance during the period from 3 hours before, to perhaps 1 hour after 2:15 UTC. It is likely most were Airbus airplanes since the carriers were Air France (four, besides AF447), Air TAM (three), Air Iberia (two), Lufthansa (two) and British Airways (one). One Air France plane left São Paulo bound for Paris on 31 May 2009 at 22:10 UTC after AF447 left Rio de Janeiro at 22:03 UTC that same day, so they must have been as close to each other on the same route as allowed by regulations for safe separation. Several of the other planes passed AF447′s last known position within 30 minutes of the disappearance. None reported anything unusual (one passenger on a flight 40 minutes behind AF447 recalled a half hour of turbulence near the equator).

The effects causing AF447 to fall from flight were extremely localized and short-lived.

Question 2. Pitot Tubes measure airspeed, but on AF447 they failed due to icing. Did a loss of speed data cause the flight control computers to issue bad commands, which led to a loss of control in bad weather?

A Pitot probe is a small tube facing into the airflow from the nose of an airplane; it’s purpose is to sense ram pressure, which is interpreted for speed. Obviously, the speed sensor fails if the tube becomes plugged. It has to be maintained and cleared of insect nests, insects impacted during flight through swarms, and dirt; it has to drain off rainwater without distorting the pressure reading; and it has to be equipped with a heater to melt impacted ice.

A number of Airbus planes have had problems with Pitot probes that failed due to icing, and the entire A330 and A340 series have been undergoing retrofits. The AF447 Airbus A330-200 did not yet have the improved Pitot tubes, but since its loss Air France has speeded the retrofitting of its Airbus fleet, and all carriers are now quite focused to complete this task. There have been many recent articles in the news and in pilot forums like airliners.net, about the Pitot tube problems on Airbus planes.

The Airbus A330 uses three Pitot tubes, and its air data computers select the reading from any two that agree. None agreed on AF447 (at 2:10 UTC) so the flight control system informed the pilots that speed data was unreliable — absent — and it shifted flight control from the fully automatic mode to an alternate mode, which is comparable to the amount of computerized flight control on a Boeing 777.

Airbus pilots have a back-up procedure for estimating speed on the basis of other instruments (angle of attack and engine power) in case their airspeed indicators fail. This procedure is simplified to about three simple control settings (for thrust), for low, medium and high altitude; and which are to be committed to memory for use in emergencies.¹⁴

The computerized flight control system does not blindly use inconsistent data to compute bad commands to control surface actuators. Instead, it flags the discrepancy and turns control over to the pilots, and the pilots have their back-up procedure for flight with unreliable speed data. The loss of speed data alone is not sufficient to cause the loss of flight control.

Question 3. Did a loss of speed data cause the AF447 pilots to overspeed the airplane to the point of structural damage, because they believed they were preventing a stall?

An airplane must move fast enough to generate the aerodynamic lift force that holds its weight aloft. The stall speed is the minimum for flight. Stall speed increases with altitude because the atmosphere becomes thinner. The stall speed for the AF447 Airbus A330-200 at 35,000 feet was 759 kph (472 mph).

Airliners are designed to fly at high subsonic speeds because supersonic travel requires much higher fuel consumption. They have swept wings that remain behind the curved pressure wave the airliner’s nose plows before it, and which becomes a shock wave when the airplane moves at or above the speed of sound.

Consider a straight-wing airplane moving at sonic to low supersonic speed. The outer parts of the wings will extend ahead of the curved bow wave, and produce additional shock waves. Because neither flight speed nor incoming air density and temperature are perfectly uniform, shock waves will oscillate about some mean position relative to the airplane, causing fluctuations in the distribution of pressure force on the aircraft surface. Also, shock waves that cross the surfaces of wings will cause the flow to separate, destroying the lift. Shock waves create drag, and more shock waves create more drag. Maintaining high speed against high drag requires large engines with high fuel consumption. Supersonic airplanes are equipped with very powerful engines to accelerate them quickly from the subsonic to supersonic regime.

The maximum speed for a subsonic airliner is set by the criterion of ensuring no localized sonic flows nor shocks. For example, flow scooting around the joint of a wing and the fuselage, or some bulge on the skin, might be locally faster than the average aircraft speed. That average must be kept below the point where the fastest localized flows are sonic. Besides ensuring a smooth attached flow over the skin of the airplane, the absence of shock waves ensures there are no abrupt changes in pressure from point to point along the airframe. Such jagged and fluctuating distributions of aerodynamic force would produce large stresses and torques on airframes, and require they be much more robust. Robust equals heavier equals smaller equals less payload equals more fuel consumption equals unprofitable civil air transport like the now-retired Concorde. The upper speed limit for AF447, at 35,000 feet in clear weather, was 913 kph (567 mph).

The speed of sound depends entirely on the temperature of the air, and as this cools with elevation (below the stratosphere where most civil aviation occurs), the speed of Mach 1 decreases with height. Since stall speed increases with height, an altitude is reached beyond which a given airplane cannot fly. This is called the “coffin corner.” A pilot cruising near this altitude has only a narrow window of safe speed. This pilot must be alert to stay ahead of a stall while not speeding too quickly and subjecting the airplane to large fluctuating forces pounding and ultimately breaking it. AF447′s speed window at 10.67 km altitude was 759-913 kph (472-567 mph, Mach 0.72-0.86).

AF447′s nominal cruising speed of 871 kph (Mach 0.82) was relative to headwinds of about 28 kph, so its speed relative to the earth (ground speed) was 843 kph (524 mph).

If AF447 had only lost its speed data the pilots would used their back-up speed scale (BUSS), described earlier, and the flight would have continued. There had to be additional problems to rob the pilots of the readings on which the BUSS relied, or to distract them from aviating. Additional problems could be natural: the ‘act of god’ catastrophic updraft or turbulence that went undetected by all and disappeared with AF447; the problems could be multiple and simultaneous aircraft systems failures; and the additional problem could be the pilots’ own mistake in becoming absorbed in trying to interpret the cascade of error messages and to reboot their computer systems, and so lose sight of their drifting airspeed until it was too late.

The mystery at this point is that nature does not seem to have been unusually unkind at that time and place, it is hard to believe the airplane would have multiple systems failures and suffer a catastrophic disintegration without some overwhelming external force being applied, and it is hard to believe the flight crew was anything other than highly competent, experienced, prepared and alert.

Question 4. Can lightning more easily penetrate the composite panels of the Airbus A330-200, and this effect initiate the problems of AF447: by causing an electrical fault disrupting computer systems, or sparking a fire or fuel explosion?

The first 20 years of aviation were dominated by composite airplanes, which were made of resin-painted canvas-covered wood frames, a construction method used earlier for canvas-covered canoes. Metal airplanes were built to meet the demands of higher speeds, larger load capacity and greater reliability. Aside from its aerodynamic and mechanical functions of producing lift, reducing drag, and containing cabin pressure, the surface of a metal airplane has the electromagnetic function of acting as a Faraday Cage, shielding the interior (passengers and crew, cargo, fuel system, electronics and control systems) from any external electromagnetic threats, such as lightning.

Electromagnet waves and arcs (like lightning) will easily penetrate composite panels unless they contain layers of metal foil or metallic fibers, which are connected to grounding points so as to short-circuit and bleed away incident electric currents. Composite panels designed for airplane skins must incorporate such metallic lamina to shield the aircraft from lightning, and to ensure that no external electromagnetic emissions can penetrate to sensitive electronic systems within the airplane and interfere with their operation (electrical noise shielding). Engineers are aware of these requirements and have standards (and regulations) to guide their design efforts.

The electronics and computer systems in airliners today are so complex and sensitive that the electromagnetic shielding has to be a critical part of the design of the airframe. Ideally, a new design is tested against real electromagnetic waves and electric arcs, and not just “virtually” with computer simulations, to verify the Faraday Cage performance of the structure. Since the average airliner experiences about one lightning strike a year, reality eventually weeds out the bad designs.

The fact of the automatic messages from AF447 shows that electrical power was available until at least 2:14 UTC that day, there were no indications of interruptions or surges.

Also, there was no indication that lightning occurred near AF447′s last known position during the time of its disappearance (based on NASA surveillance). Storms in equatorial oceanic regions exhibit an unusual lack of lightning, a fact motivating current meteorological research. See (3) for sources on this topic.

So, it seems lightning is a very unlikely contributing factor to the disappearance of AF447.

Question 5. Do composites degrade more easily and quickly than aluminum and steel, and are composite airplanes more fragile that all-metal airplanes?

The contemporary use of composite materials for aircraft structures is very new, and there is less than twenty years experience with them in the field. From the very studies that were used to devise these engineered materials, scientists learned about their weaknesses as well. Composites are fibrous or mesh layers (lamina) bonded together by a resin or cement matrix. Shock and cyclic stresses can lead to failure of the material by separation of layers — delamination.

Cyclic stresses can be from pressurization and de-pressurization, or cycles of temperature extremes that cause stresses by thermal expansion and contraction, or severe vibration and repetitive torquing. A composite panel may develop an interior separation that remains unnoticed for some time before the complete failure of the panel. The integrity of composite airliner panels must to be checked periodically, by visual inspection and acoustic probing (which might be tapping to hear a ‘funny’ sound).

In 2002, airplane mechanics working for the Federal Express delivery service discovered that the hydraulic fluid used in the actuators of an Airbus plane had dissolved some of the composite material of the rudder, causing a separation from control rods, and difficulties during flight. In 2005, a rudder removed for inspection revealed extensive delamination between its outer layer and its inner core; traces of hydraulic fluid were found between these layers in the area of separation.

These and other incidents of composite material-related rudder malfunctions on Airbus planes cast doubt on the ascription of pilot error as the cause of the American Airlines Flight 587 accident of 12 November 2001. An Airbus A300-600 just airborne and climbing crossed into the wake turbulence of a nearby Boeing 747; the first officer made aggressive rudder motions to keep the Airbus plane upright, and the rudder snapped off followed by the vertical fin, leading to a horrific crash into a residential neighborhood of Queens, New York City. What if the strength of the rudder and its joints to its actuators and axle had been seriously degraded earlier?

William John Cox has reviewed many incidents and accidents with Airbus planes in which the composite-material vertical stabilizer and rudder was a key factor. The strength of his doubts about composite rudders is reflected by the title of his article, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?”¹⁵

The overall technical question that has to be answered about composite materials used in aviation is: what causes them to degrade during their service life, and how long is that service life? We can break down the overall question to types of sources of both sporadic and cyclic stress: aerodynamic (pressure), mechanical (vibration, torque, impact, shock), thermal (heated expansion and cooled contraction), chemical (surface reactions with gases and liquids found in aviation, the effect on bulk integrity by the absorption of moisture, gases, volatile organic compounds), electrical (corona and arc discharge effects on surface integrity) and radiative (ultraviolet light embrittlement).

There is no technical reason why composite-material aviation structures should be less safe than their metal counterparts. But, it may be that an equivalent degree of safety would require that composite panels, shells and structures be replaced more often than metal pieces, because the composites may degrade more quickly under the combined actions of the pressurization and deep cooling cycles of flight, the corrosive and embrittling effects of ozone and ultraviolet light, the dissolving and delaminating effects of hydraulic fluids and volatile organic compounds (fuel and solvent vapors), and the fracturing by impact with hail and other hard airborne grit.

The loss of AF447 underscores the need to answer these questions.

An Imagined Final Sequence

Assume AF447 flies into a patch of especially dense and especially cold fog whose supercooled droplets freeze on contact to rime ice, which clings tenaciously; 12 other flights miss as intense a fog freeze. Supercooled fog droplets are small and have low reflectivity to radar, pilots have to tilt their radar antennas down and turn up the gain to see the rain and hail at lower elevations ahead to infer a high concentration of ice crystals and supercooled fog above, assuming there is little horizontal wind shear so the high ice and fog have not moved laterally from their formative updraft and rainout downdraft. But, this can happen as the cloud’s anvil, so perhaps fog freeze is unavoidable if the flight is weaving between storm cells. Rime ice sticks on contact, accumulating into a solid mass with many air pockets. Twenty four steps of an imaginative sequence follow.

1. Gradual icing reduces the inlet areas of all 3 Pitot probes, uniformly. The angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor is a weathervane attached to a horizontal shaft at the side of the aircraft near its nose. The AOA measures the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis of the airplane. Assume the AOA vane also ices, swiveling gradually to higher angle. Both effects cause a gradual speed-up on auto-thrust (the airplane version of cruise control).

2. Pitot icing blockage becomes severe and non-uniform; a 50 kph discrepancy between probes is recorded.

3. The Pitot system fails at 2:10 UTC, auto-pilot and auto-thrust go to the “alternate” mode, which is comparable to the combination of automatic and manual control used on the Boeing 777. The rudder is no longer limited to only 5 degrees of deflection because the flight control programming presumes the pilots would need the freedom of greater motion to perform recovery maneuvers. The shift to alternate mode is not a failure of the automated system, but the response programmed for the situation.

4. The speed window (“coffin corner”) at 35,000 feet is 757-913 kph (Mach 0.72-0.86). The pilots had set auto-thrust to maintain a speed near 881 kph (Mach 0.83). They are fooled into thinking their present speed is about 834-850 kph because of the last presumably good speed readings they observed prior to the warnings of 2:10 UTC. They assume the current power settings are for this speed, when actually the speed has crept up to 913-929 kph without notice.

5. Arriving at excessive speed causes 1.3 g shaking, which is self-induced but they interpret as atmospheric turbulence. If they were really cruising at 881 kph (Mach 0.83) and had encountered turbulence, then they should have reduced their speed to 819 kph (Mach 0.77). Assuming this is their situation, they try reducing speed by using the ‘no airspeed data’ flying procedure. They throttle back a bit, guessing at a 16-32 kph reduction based on the combination of the AOA sensor (which is iced and showing too high an angle) and the power setting. They assume the power setting accounts for a higher headwind than is the case (because it seems high), and they want to be assured of avoiding a stall, so they actually only reduce power to slow down by 16 kph to 897-913 kph (a good thing, too!), imagining they are now flying at 819-834 kph.

6. The AOA system fails at 2:11 UTC. Either the vane stalk is frozen into position, or the 1.3+ g shaking from excessive speed has caused too many erratic and wide swings of the vane, and it has faced broadside into the flow and become heavily balled up in ice. So, speed guessing is now nearing impossible. They are at about 897-913 kph when they should be 819 kph, assuming turbulence; and there may actually be some real turbulence as well. The majority of the “turbulence” they are experiencing is really the buffeting effect of excessive speed caused by the erratic shock and pressure jumps along the fuselage, wings, tailplanes, vertical stabilizer and rudder during transonic cruise. At 2:12 UTC, air data discrepancies are flagged; perhaps icing and transonic flow (shock wave effects) prevent other measurements such as of total air temperature.

7. Swept-wing transports have a tendency to swing back and forth in a lateral rolling motion called a Dutch Roll. A combined yaw and roll make the nose point left and the right wing dip (or go into the opposite combination), which is countered by the ailerons to level the wings, and the rudder to steer back on track. But, the lag in response swings the plane past straight and level into a nose pointing right and the left wing down attitude. The Dutch Roll is an oscillation between control inputs and lateral swings. Part of the automatic flight control system is a yaw damper, a slight shifting of the rudder back and forth as needed to keep the airplane straight and level.

At 2:13 UTC, AF447 was flying at excessive speed, the surrounding atmosphere may have exacerbated flight instability by being turbulent, and the flight control system no longer limited rudder deflection to 5 degrees. Yaw damping became ineffective. Because of the 1.3+ g shaking and the shock-induced flow disruptions of transonic cruise, the responses to the deflections of the ailerons and rudder became erratic, and an amplifying Dutch Roll oscillation sets in.

8. A big tail swing right is countered by a rightward rudder deflection of greater then 5 degrees, and the combined moment (torque) to the right and the air resistance against the vertical fin (to the left) puts a greater then 2.5 g load on the vertical stabilizer, and snaps the entire fin-plus-rudder assembly off to the left.

9. The loss of the vertical stabilizer releases resistance to the rightward moment, and an instant angular acceleration of 3.5 to 5 g, or more, swings the tail rightward.

10. The rear pressure bulkhead in the fuselage has a pressure force directed rearward, from the pressurized cabin and cargo hold toward the unpressurized tailcone. During a rightward tail swing, this force points to the back and rightward. At the same time, the rightward moment acting on the tailcone puts a lateral force on it, which is to the left and increasingly back during the rightward swing. With the tail wagged right, the rear bulkhead is tilted forward on right side, backward on left side, and the resultant force on it is more or less straight back. This causes a rotation of the bulkhead so as to open its seam on the right side of the fuselage, breaching the pressure seal and allowing the cabin to de-pressurizes rapidly.

11. An automatic signal sent at 2:14 UTC announces cabin de-pressurization.

12. The unimpeded rightward tail swing sweeps the right wing square into the airstream while the airplane is near its maximum speed, about 881-913 kph (Mach 0.83-0.86). This swings the right wing leading edge forward at a higher relative speed than Mach 1, so it moves forward of the leading shock.

13. The shock extends along the middle chord of right wing, now angled more squarely into the flow, and causes flow separation behind it, with a complete loss of lift; shock stall.

14. The plane’s nose is yawed left in a rightward tail swing, the right side losses lift force while left keeps it, and the result is a sudden strong moment causing a rotation (perhaps 5 g) about the plane’s longitudinal axis: left side/wing up, right side/wing down.

15. The excessive right twist of the fuselage causes engine pylons to fail. Engine number 1 (left side) breaks off — cutting electrical power — rotating in an upward swing right, smashing into the bottom of the left wing near the wing root and trailing edge, and then smashing into and through the left side of the fuselage just past the left wing root.

16. Engine number 2 (right side) swings up and right to twist bottom-up through the right wing leading edge, outboard of the engine location, and the outer wing then snaps off by rotating about the rip, with a tip upward motion. Air blast through its underside blows off upper surface spoilers like the one recovered by the Brazilian Navy.

17. The tailplanes probably snap off at the same time as the engines.

18. The reduction in mass on the right side, relative to the left, gives a boost (less inertia and drag) to the rightward roll underway.

19. The rear section of fuselage twists off from its remaining right side connection with a leftward swing, and the tailcone section separates from it, tearing off from the right to left side of its pressure bulkhead seam.

20. The interior of the fuselage originally behind the wings experiences an air blast through its forward open section toward the tail end; many panels and weakly attached objects are blown out.

21. The still intact assembly of forward fuselage plus right wing stub plus left wing continues to roll completely over while also yawing back and forth, for several cycles. The wing experiences lift forces that make the entire body spin, like a maple seed pod, whose single airfoil causes it to gyrate during a swinging descent.

22. The angular force at the left wingtip and at the cockpit end of the fuselage are greatest, so the fuselage snaps apart aft of the cockpit and also ahead of the left wing root, while an outboard length of left wing also snaps off.

23. The sections of the airplane that fall are: the vertical stabilizer with its rudder (recovered by the Brazilian Navy), the tailcone (with or without tailplanes), the rear cabin section (probably further ruptured during descent by air blast), the engines, the right wing outboard of the number 2 engine location; then after a bit of ‘maple seed’ auto-rotating helicopter flight as a unit: the cockpit section of the forward fuselage, another length of the forward fuselage, an outer length of left wing and the wing root section of the fuselage with the remaining wing stubs.

24. The four sections of the cabin (the tailcone is a fifth fuselage section) guessed here might experience further air blast rupture and content ejection as they descend; and the large structural remnants hitting the water would then suffer collision fragmentation.

What’s Next?

Perhaps some day we will know the real sequence of events and apply its lessons to improve our aircraft, or modify our air transport habits.

To move beyond imagination we need more facts. If the voice and flight data recorders are ever recovered (lost under the ocean over a month at this point), then investigators will learn much more. The public may learn more soon because the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) is set to issue an initial technical report on the 2nd of July.

1. Boeing Backs Airbus on AF447.
2. Map of Time Zones.
3. Tim Vasquez, “Air France Flight 447, A Detailed Meteorological Analysis.”
4. Map, From INTOL To TASIL.
5. Air France Flight 447, Wikipedia.
6. Simon Hradecky, “Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean,” The Aviation Herald.
7. AF447 Airbus A330-200 Vertical Stabilizer And Rudder, Wikipedia.
8. BEA’s AF447 “Sea Search Operations,” (link “sea search operations” produces PDF file with maps).
9. Brazilian Air Force, Information On AF447, see “fotos.”
10. Air Safety, Wikipedia.
11. Aviation accidents and incidents, Wikipedia.
12. P-3 Orion At 7 g.
13. AF A332 Crash (F-GZCP) Part 16, ‘Recovered Spoiler‘:

    Reply 204, Pihero,
    Reply 205, KingFriday013,
    Reply 242, Guillermo.

14. Joelle Barthe, procedure for Airbus flight without airspeed data.
15. William John Cox, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?“

Determining what actually happened will require recovering and examining the remnants of the airplane, in particular the major fragments of the airframe, the engines, and most importantly the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder). Without the benefit of a pilot’s radio report, investigators would only have the flight histories of the selected components and parameters that are monitored by the flight recorders. One worry is that the flight recorders are submerged at between 9,000 ft (2744 m) and 14,000 ft (4268 m) and may be difficult to find; their casings are designed to withstand the pressure of 6000 m (19,680 ft) depth for up to 30 days.

Speculation about what may have happened centers on lightning causing a massive electrical surge that caused the failure of (fused, short-circuited, overloaded) the fly-by-wire flight controls; and severe buffeting in a thunderstorm, which disrupted the flight-path.

Pilots of fly-by-wire airplanes do not normally use muscles or hydraulics to move the many flaps and the rudder; electric motors controlled by computers do this to an extent set by the pilots’ manipulation of their control levers, pedals and wheels. The lightning-blackout scenario is unlikely because lightning strikes happen regularly in commercial and military aviation, and airplanes are designed to withstand them (by keeping the electrical charges outside the plane’s interior, because of the all-metal hull and wing surfaces). Also, pilots are trained (in simulators) to compensate for loss of the fly-by-wire system by using the mechanical control system of the trim tabs to push the bigger flaps and the rudder into place. Trim tabs the smallest of the many types of movable flaps, which act like the tails of weathervanes, pushing the larger flaps or rudders they are embedded in into new angles; in normal operation the trim tabs are an assist and a fine adjustment.

The lack of a distress call from the pilots suggests two possibilities: their radios were inoperative or had lost power (which would be odd since the automated data transmission system was functioning), or a very sudden breakup of the airframe in flight. Airframes of modern commercial airliners like the Airbus A330-200 are designed to withstand the buffeting of air turbulence and the stresses of the severe turns and dives that may occur in emergencies. If the airframe broke up prior to impact with the water, what was its cause? Obvious guesses are: missile, bomb and fuel tank explosion.

There is no evidence of a missile attack, so we eliminate that guess. Sabotage by bomb is also discounted, because that guess requires too many elaborate assumptions. Actually, any speculation is entirely unjustified at this point, since recovering evidence and systematic analysis have yet to begin. However, events like this inspire fear and cause minds to race, speculating on causes and meanings.

So, we are led to the question of a fuel tank explosion, could it have happened in AF 447 as either a natural event (electrostatic discharge into fuel-air vapors above liquid fuel in an agitated tank) or an unintended electro-mechanical failure (spark from wire exposed by damaged insulation, into fuel-air vapors) as in the TWA Flight 800 disaster of 1996.

The fuel tanks of airliners are fitted into the wings and the section of the hull below the passenger deck and along the length of the wing roots. The central fuel tank between the wings is usually the single largest volume fuel container. As a plane climbs to higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure drops and so the air originally contained in a fuel tank at the airport seeks to expand; if the tank were sealed this would cause the internal pressure to increasing exceed the external pressure and put great stress on the tank walls. Similarly, as fuel is pumped out of a tank to the engines, the space evacuated must be filled with ambient air to avoid creating a vacuum that would resist subsequent pumping. So, fuel tanks are designed with vents that allow air to flow in, and fuel-air vapors to flow out as needed to equalize pressures at any altitude. The vents are in the form of pipes that run from the central fuel tank through the wing tanks and out to the wing tips where an orifice, at each wing tip, allows for the exchange of air.

Because hydrocarbon liquids and vapors are very insulating electrically, and metals are excellent conductors, there is always a build-up of electrostatic charge between fuel flows and metal containers. This is why sparks can be generated when fuels are pumped into rapid flows or sprays near metal surfaces. There have been many accidents caused by electrostatic discharges into fuel-air mixtures, which were initiated by improperly grounded or excessively turbulent pumping procedures. The petroleum industry has long known about this phenomenon, and developed many standards for the design and operation of fuel pumping and storage equipment. Also, many fuels have chemical additives that enhance their electrical conductivity, to significantly reduce their ability to hold electrostatic charges (reducing the electrostatic build-up relative to the metal piping and containers during pumping and/or sloshing).

The fuel vent pipes of airliners are one type of fuel pumping system. These must be designed to minimize the electrostatic build-up between the flowing fuel-air mixture and the pipe walls. Larger diameter vent pipes will keep flow velocities low (electrostatic build-up and the possibility of sparking increase with flow velocity). Plenum chambers and baffles along the flow path can help prevent bursts of rapid flow in reaction to some mechanical jolt to the wing structure or some sudden drop in external air pressure (which would impulsively draw out fuel-air vapors). Using additives to significantly increase the fuel’s conductivity is also extremely helpful.

Because the airplane manufacturing, airline transport and fuel industries routinely do a good job of managing the fuel and fueling risks, it is rare that we hear about fuel fires and explosions on the tarmac or in flight. However, fuel vapor explosion accidents still do happen; a Boeing 737-400 parked at the gate in 2001 had its center tank explode, killing one person.

Despite the many airliners that experience lightning strikes without harm, it may be that the destruction of AF 447 was the rare instance of lightning igniting the fuel-air vent flow, which subsequently caused a major fuel tank explosion.

Whatever the cause of the loss of AF 447, the loss of 228 lives demands that it be found, and the lesson applied to improve air transport safety.

The last paragraph summarizes the publicly available facts about the DPRK’s nuclear test #2 (see notes here and here for news accounts). Commentary on the meaning of this test was actually written three years ago, on the occasion of the DPRK’s nuclear test #1 of 9 October 2006 (see here and here).

My commentary of 2006 still applies because neither the policy goals of the United States and Security Council Nuclear Powers, nor the fears of the DPRK leadership have changed since 2006. In the simplest terms, world capitalism under the direction of the United States wants the North Koreans to dismantle their DPRK state and to integrate their economy and workforce into that of an expanded Republic of Korea (South Korea) in a manner similar to the dissolution of the East German communist state (Democratic Republic of Germany, 7 October 1949 to 3 October 1990). The foreign policy of the DPRK, of which its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs are a part, is aimed at combatting the existential threat to the DPRK governing elite.

First, let us consider some of the physical aspects of DPRK test #2.

A yield up to 20 kT is clearly a “success” and indicates the verification of one design of an implosion system (discounting the possibility of a gun-type assembly as in the Hiroshima bomb). I presume, but do not know, that this bomb is an experimental device that is neither compact and light-weight enough, nor ruggedized enough to fit within the payload mass and space limitations of a slim missile body, and to withstand the forces of acceleration required of a ballistic missile nuclear warhead. Any program aimed at that goal will require another test (in perhaps three years?) of a militarized packaging of the “pit” (nuclear core and its surrounding blanket of high explosives) tested today.

The amazingly deep burial at 10 km will probably assure full containment of radioactivity from the DPRK test. US underground tests were often 0.3 km to 0.5 km down. Because of the rapid attenuation of the high frequency parts of an electrical signal with its travel distance along a cable, the US nuclear program engineered its underground tests with the minimum burial depth necessary to assure containment, so as to have the highest fidelity possible for the detection and recording systems relaying and storing experimental data from sensors near the device. Optimizing the burial depth for signal fidelity required a sophisticated arrangement of plugs and backfill to seal the emplacement shaft or tunnel. I wonder if the DPRK test program is satisfied with simple low-fidelity data (the simplest being the sensation of an artificial earthquake), or if they have an underground alcove with high-fidelity recording equipment in a cavern near the detonation point. It may be that the DPRK wished to avoid snooping by US intelligence satellites, so it buried the entire test operation. It is also possible to partially decouple the force of a buried explosion from the surrounding earth by placing the bomb in the center of a larger cavity; this will transmit a weaker seismic signal, and could spoof seismic measurements of yield by foreign powers.

Clearly, the DPRK nuclear program scientists evaluated the data from their test of October 2006, made new calculations, undoubtedly built new assemblies for hydrodynamic testing (perfecting the dynamics of the heavy-metal implosion driven by chemical high explosives), and settled on a design that produced sizable yield. It is equally clear that their nuclear materials program was able to produce sufficient weapons-grade fissile material for at least one new device since 2006 (perhaps 10 kg), and probably several times that amount.

All in all, it is evident they are now a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapons club. The most honest reaction the Security Council of the UN, and the leading world powers could offer would be: “congratulations!”

Now, let us speculate on the political fallout.

The DPRK has made the clearest possible statement that the best defense against domination by superior powers is nuclear weaponry. The greater care with which the U.S. and Security Council Nuclear Powers approach the DPRK confirms this argument. When observing the situations of Palestine, Iraq and Iran, most of the rest of the world would concede the validity of the argument.

The policy of the U.S. is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and renounce nuclear weapons — while exempting itself from it; essentially “disarm that we may more easily rule.” The DPRK posture is a rejection of the US policy, and a pointed example of rebellion calling out to the rest of the world.

Another aspect of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons politics is to put its near neighbors on notice not to think of colonizing it. This message is particularly aimed at South Korea, seen as an extension of US capitalism, and to Japan. There are still Koreans living who remember being brutally enslaved by Imperial Japan, which forcibly annexed Korea during 1910 to 1945. Even more Koreans remember the 1950-1953 war between China and the U.S., on their peninsula. The casualties of that war, for the US-led anti-communist forces, were 474,000; the combined casualties for the communist Chinese and North Korean forces were between 1.19 million and 1.58 million; and the total number of Korean civilians killed or wounded is estimated at 2 million.

Today, Japan fustigates that it may have to build its own nuclear weapons (within one year!) to counter those of the DPRK, and South Korea issued similar statements to assuage domestic concerns about the nuclear developments in the North. There is little reason to fear aggression by the DPRK. While it may soon be true that it could launch a few nuclear warheads into South Korea, Japan and toward US bases and fleets in the Pacific, such attacks would ensure the swift destruction of the DPRK elite by retaliatory actions of the most modern military forces on this planet. Nuclear weapons would not be needed for this; waves of GPS-guided missile strikes with conventional high explosive warheads, followed by similarly guided airborne bombing would eradicate the DPRK nomenklatura and its entire military infrastructure. Also, it is very likely that missiles launched by North Korea would be immediately detected by US and allied nations’ radars and satellites, and countered by anti-missile missiles (today’s equivalent to the flak thrown up in WW2). Such defenses are more likely to be effective against long-range missiles since there is more time to react. The DPRK leadership knows from its own history that US-led military action has no regard for Korean loss-of-life, so they are fully aware that their nuclear arsenal is only a stratagem strictly limited to diplomatic gamesmanship short of actual war.

So, what does the DPRK leadership hope to gain by brandishing nuclear arms? The DPRK leadership’s deepest desire is that of all elites everywhere: a long-term guarantee of its privileged position within the undisturbed extent of its domain. The DPRK wants to interact with the rest of the world in a way that sustains the physical and economic existence of their state but without introducing any ideas or social forces that weaken the control of the DPRK leadership, and the fealty of the population to that leadership. Clearly, the present DPRK regime is skeptical it can follow the Chinese example of introducing a state-directed form of capitalism while maintaining ideological control and sufficient popular obedience, so it is resistant to allowing the population wider exposure to foreign influences. The DPRK nuclear arsenal is the equivalent of a 10 foot (3.3 m) high wall topped with glass shards surrounding an estate with Pit Bulls and Doberman Pinschers running loose. It is a shield built with pride and motivated by fear.

Unfortunately, urging the DPRK leadership to engage in nuclear disarmament is equivalent to urging it to dissolve; the nature of their brittle power structure could not withstand the corrosive effects of the psychological, cultural and economic forces within world capitalism. They know this, hence the obsessive defensiveness. The most humane policy toward the DPRK would be to leave it alone. Over the long term, if it is neither harassed nor provoked, it will slowly relax many of its fears. Once the apprehensions of the DPRK are reasonably lowered because it is no longer being pressured and hurried to fit into a foreign capitalist agenda, then it is likely the society of the DPRK will evolve into greater harmony with the world consensus on many issues. Such a policy would be one of respecting the integrity of another society, and of non-interference. It is definitely not the policy with the highest expected return on investment (ROI), nor the earliest expected payoff, but it is the policy with the least likelihood of harming the Korean people and their neighbors. One has to imagine the possibility of arriving at nuclear disarmament as the inevitable consequence of the disuse of nuclear weapons: they are no longer maintained and rust away because their owners have moved on to other activities.

Internationally, patient respect will ultimately soften the fearful pride of an otherwise unaggressive state. The real solution to nuclear proliferation is the expansion of social and economic justice within our own nations, because nuclear arms are primarily a symptom of economic class warfare coupled with racism. Let the people of North Korea deal with their economic elite, and let us reform ours; and in that way we can eliminate the nuclear weapons squeezed out of the world’s popular collective labor by our various ambitious and parasitic ruling classes.

The impetus for this interview (Sobre poder atómico, cambio climático, energías limpias y formas de organanización ciudadanas) was the publication of a Spanish translation of Garcia’s CounterPunch article “To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?”

Salvador López Arnal: Let us start with a few basic notions. When we talk about nuclear fusion, what do we really mean?

Manuel García, Jr.: Nuclear fusion is the application of energy to a pair of atomic nuclei so as to force them into each other despite the electric and nuclear forces of repulsion that normally keep nuclei separate and distinct, so that some of the combined nuclear mass is transformed into energy by Einstein’s formula E = m c-squared, and is emitted as nuclear radiation; and the remaining combined mass is reformed into an new single nucleus of a different chemical element.

SLA: This new source of energy is sometimes associated with a defeat of climatic change. Why? Do you think this is a fantasy of self-interest by governments, military powers and large corporations?

MG,Jr.: The consensus of modern science is that the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas emitted by the many, many sources of combustion of hydrocarbons (petroleum and many forms of natural and processed organic matter) inherent in human activity has made the Earth’s atmosphere warmer and more insulating (it traps more infrared radiation, which is heat) than it was before the industrial exploitation of petroleum. So, human activity in combination with natural cycles of climate are producing an effect that is called global warming (“Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention“).

By comparing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere today with conditions and climates of the distant past, so far as science can detect them; and by running computer simulations of Earth’s climate into the far future, scientists can arrive at a wide variety of possibilities of what our climate might evolve to during this century. Many of these predictions are unpleasant, some generally, and others for particular regions and portions of humanity. For example, some island nations may disappear because of the rise of the ocean level due to the melting of the ice caps.

The difficulty faced by modern society is that the great work-saving technologies, comforts and advances much of the developed world enjoys are possible because of abundant energy, which we generate by the combustion of coal (for electricity and industrial process heat) and petroleum (for transportation technology and military mobility), and this combustion is the source of the CO2 that might trigger a major change in Earth’s climate to much less hospitable conditions. Do we forsake today’s comforts and conveniences for decades, even longer, solely based on fears arising out of computer simulations, and which may not come to pass? Or, do we proceed emitting enormous quantities of waste heat (CO2 and entropy) to continue our capitalist mode of industrialized resource exploitation, and wealth accumulation for a select few, even if it triggers a catastrophic shift in climate and a drastic reduction of food production?

How to respond to the uncertainties and challenges of global warming, by finding the right balance between our old technologies of energy production, new ones that emit less CO2 but may need development and investment before achieving their full potential, and imposing stricter measures of energy conservation and accepting greater inconveniences (like the reuse and recycling of current items) is a subject of major contention today. Nobody wants to give up their particular way of making a profit just because it may contribute to global warming, and also many would like to find profitable business ventures that exploit the concerns over global warming. So what begins as a discussion of geophysics and its impact on society degenerates into many arguments about making money, and politics: who is going to “win” and who is going to “lose?”

Clearly, if we can find new ways of generating abundant energy without also emitting CO2, then the comforts of the First World can be continued, and the necessary improvements for the Third World can be made without causing a change of the world’s climate. So, many suggest that their favorite technology or hoped-for future profit-making scheme will provide energy without CO2 emission. Some of these claims have more merit than others, and many groups that make such claims are seeking government subsidies (research money or tax breaks).

The nuclear power industry is advertising itself as a “green” technology, one that does not emit CO2. This is blatantly false as all the mining, fuel processing, transportation, construction and waste disposal activities associated with nuclear power create CO2 emissions. Wind and solar energy are the most efficient as regards energy produced per mass of CO2 emitted. The deficiencies of wind and solar in terms of their convenience are that they are energy sources of low concentration (they may require a large area for collection) and low power (low to moderate temperature or limited electrical power from any single generator). Conservation is the most cost-effective “green” technology today, it simply means reducing the waste associated with whatever energy generation methods are already in use.

SLA: So, at this point fusion is promoted as the solution?

MG,Jr.: One dream that grew out of nuclear physics is the vision of devising fusion reactors to power society. We are familiar with the enormous output of energy from nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a nucleus) whether slowly in nuclear reactors or suddenly as in explosions of nuclear bombs. But, there is a much larger yield of energy from nuclear fusion; and an essentially unlimited supply of fusion fuel. The fusion of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, powers our Sun (the Sun’s own gravity from its huge mass squeezing the nuclei together at its core). Here on Earth, deuterium and tritium occur naturally in trace quantities in the oceans; and they are readily made from ordinary water irradiated with neutrons in nuclear reactors. The fusion dream is to use deuterium and tritium to make power reactors of much greater yield than nuclear fission reactors, and which do not use radioactive metals for fuel, nor generate the same quantities of radioactive waste.

The leading idea in the quest for technological fusion energy has been the magnetic compression of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) plasma (a highly electrified gaseous form of matter) in devices called tokamaks (magnetic fusion energy has nearly 60 years of research). A more recent idea (over 35 years) is laser-fusion (called inertial confinement fusion). The NIF facility I discussed in my recent article is a laser-fusion facility (“¿Bombas nucleares o luz solar?“).

Fusion works marvelously in stars because they are so massive. Their huge gravity forces nuclei into fusion at the star’s core, and the huge bulk of the star is of sufficient depth and density to easily capture and contain the nuclear energy released by fusion reactions. Fusion is a process of energy generation that is mismatched to the much smaller scale of our Earth. The Sun extends 109 times further from its center than the Earth, and it is 333,000 times more massive. Science has yet to devise an artificial star, a steady fusion reactor; but it has devised impulsive ones, which are nuclear (hydrogen) bombs. My article described how NIF (National Ignition Facility) and facilities like it assist in the design of nuclear weapons.

SLA: What are your criticisms of nuclear energy, generally?

MG,Jr.: My criticism of nuclear power in all the forms described, for the purpose of providing a steady supply of electricity to a nation, is twofold:

1, the technology is not well matched to the end-use, there are many complexities, dangers, and inefficiencies between the fuel source and the electrical output, the entire cycle from fuel production to waste management is excessively costly (per kWh of electricity produced) fiscally, environmentally and politically;

2, the nature of the technology makes for highly centralized generator sites (which must also be high security zones, and are very expensive), requiring an extensive distribution network (which will have transmission losses).

Highly centralized power generation serves the needs of highly centralized economics: exclusive capital accumulation at extensive social cost. Distributed power generation serves the needs of a distributed population: communal technical networks provide local control and personal economic independence.

Solar and wind technologies can generate electricity locally and practically over much of the Earth’s surface, whether land or sea. There are far fewer conversions of energy forms from the sources to the electrical output, so there are fewer types of inefficiencies; and there are never the types of hazards associated with radioactive materials and nuclear technology. Because the energy generation processes are natural to the Earth’s environment (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind-torque-electrical, hydro-torque-electrical), the entire process cycle: from source to generation to recycling of used equipment and material, is much simpler and cheaper (by fiscal measures that are socially complete in that they account for environmental and political liabilities). Solar, wind and hydro technologies are “natural’ to the Earth, and well-matched to the end-use of residential electricity, and many industrial applications.

The dispersed nature of “the source” of solar energy (wind and hydro too, but they are more localized) means that generators and users are closer to each other (even coincident), so distribution networks will be smaller and more efficient. This means proximate local networks can have overlap, providing redundancy and thus a greater degree of overall reliability over regional and national scales. It also means the local “owners” of the generators are much more likely to be among the users of the electrical output, so the entire economics of the system becomes as distributed and decentralized as the energy source. Micro-networked solar energy is intrinsically communal. An energy system that offers a family the possibility of gaining its energy independence by harvesting the sunlight that falls, and catching the wind that whisks through the space they occupy to live, would be a wonderful thing.

However, if you are part of a group — we could call them capitalists, or industrialists, or pirates, it’s all the same — who wish to control a large source of energy, which they meter out to many individuals at a distance for a profit, then you would prefer a highly centralized energy generation technology. This is why I wrote that nuclear power is prized by the mentality that sees the taxi meter and the cash register as the purpose of organizing society. The hazards, complexities and inefficiencies that make it necessary to isolate and make large nuclear power generation sites, also fits them to the needs of monopoly control, and leaves the nation vulnerable to societal blackmail through the energy dependency of its people.

SLA: In a recent article published in CounterPunch — “To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?” — you mention that Hugh Gusterson wrote, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that the recently inaugurated National Ignition Facility (NIF), near San Francisco, was in its entirety a program of nuclear weapons development. Do you agree with that opinion? How does NIF support nuclear weapons development?

MG,Jr.: My article covered that point. NIF is funded to provide data on fusion phenomena that are created on a microscopic scale, with extremely intense pulses of laser light bombarding micro-balloons filled with deuterium and tritium. NIF will also be used to provide data on the properties of uranium and plutonium when they experience extreme pressure; microscopic samples will be compressed by laser bombardment, and fission reactions initiated. This data from experiments is then used to refine and correct computer codes that simulate the intricate physics. These codes can then be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs. NIF is intended to fill the gap left by the cessation of full-scale nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. There has never been any secret about any of this, but Thomas Friedman did not mention it in his paen to NIF as a prototype fusion energy system, published recently in the New York Times. That was Gusterson’s point.

SLA: As you say, NIF belongs to the mentality that “sees the taxi meter and the cash register… as the purpose of social organization.” But, you add, “this flow of energy in unlikely to be as safe, reliable, freely available, poverty alleviating and socially uplifting as could very easily be the case today.” What sense does it make then to choose a road of so limited value? What is hidden behind that decision?

MG,Jr.: This is because public resources are being invested for the benefit of a profiteering capitalist elite, and all risks and liabilities are being socialized. Don’t ever think that socialism is disliked in the United States. On the contrary, it is highly prized by the apex class of our economic pyramid as the best way of eliminating its wastes, expenses and responsibilities. Centralized energy technology is preferred by monopolists, and their sole focus is exclusive capital accumulation. Decentralized power generation puts more control into the hands of local communities and individuals. This method of powering the nation is clearly of superior social value (and an essential necessity in the rural Third World, with solar electricity generators of the simplest type), but it is not championed by the US government for the same reason national health care is not championed by the US government: it has been bought off by corporate money. The key political point here is that the US government does not work primarily in the interests of the public, it is an agent of corporate interests, protecting them FROM popular democratic action. By far the most devastating deficit in the U.S. today is the democratic deficit; the fiscal ones are trifles in comparison, they only entail money.

SLA: You also mention that nuclear weapons only have a functional value if their design is proved by tests and that this requirement was the reason for the many nuclear tests carried out by many countries since 1945. How many tests have been carried out to date by all nuclear nations, including Pakistan and Israel? Where are they carried out?

MG,Jr.: Since 1945 over 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out, about half were conducted by the U.S. (1054); Russia did 715, France 210, the U.K. 45, China 45, India 6 and Pakistan 6 (this total is 2081). Not all tests have been acknowledged or verified, so there are some uncertainties as to the exact number. South Africa, under the apartheid regime, and Israel may have conducted a joint test in the South Atlantic, but South Africa claims never to have tested and has since dismantled its stockpile; Israel says nothing and is not known to have conducted a nuclear test. Tests have been carried out in many places. Most US tests were in the Pacific southeast of Hawaii, and at the Nevada Test Site. Both Russia and China conducted their tests at remote sites within their territories. France conducted tests in the South Pacific, and the U.K. conducted nearly half its tests in Australia or territory controlled by it, and the rest at the Nevada Test Site. India and Pakistan used remote and desert locations for their underground tests. The test by North Korea in 2006 was of such low yield that many believe it was really a failure.

SLA: What are the difficulties and risks of working with large quantities of materials with high levels of radioactivity?

MG,Jr.: The risks are of (1) radiation exposure to people, causing illness or disability or death; (2) the possibility of grouping too much radioactive material together and initiating a chain reaction (a critical mass that proceeds to “melt down”); (3) theft of nuclear material, and its malicious misuse; (4) accidental release into the environment, introducing a pollutant with heavy metal toxicity as well as radioactivity; (5) producing a large amount of radioactive waste: the machines, materials and containers used to shield workers from radioactivity, which must be stored and kept secure for a long time; (6) incurring large and continuing expenses to pay for all the activities required by the possession of a nuclear materials industry and its legacy.

SLA: Is there any link between the use of nuclear energy and the possession of nuclear weapons?

MG,Jr.: Yes. The material for bombs is usually produced in reactors built for that purpose, but it can also be harvested from the fuel rods of civilian power reactors. All uranium nuclear reactors produce a build-up of plutonium. This is why the U.S., Russia and the major atomic powers wish to control the fuel cycle of reactors in client states that have “peaceful’ atomic power, like South Korea. The fuel cycle is the production of fuel rods for civilian reactors, and their eventual removal and “reprocessing” to remove the plutonium build-up, and recycle the remaining uranium-235, or package the rod for “disposal.” The situation of Iran’s nuclear program illustrates the intrinsic connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (“Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: What do you think of the pressures by the US and Israel to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear energy?

MG,Jr.: Both Israel and the U.S. want to prevent the rise of any competitive regional power in the Middle East and Central Asia. This is because the U.S. seeks to control the sources and economics of petroleum, and Israel seeks to undercut the source of economic sustenance to the resistance movements in the territories it invades and occupies (and its vision is large in this regard). I have elaborated on these themes elsewhere (“Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: Please give us five reasons against the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

MG,Jr.: Nuclear power is:

(1) inefficient: it is likely that more energy will have been used to build, maintain and secure nuclear power sites, and to manage the waste legacy of the nuclear power industry than it will ever supply as electricity;

(2) insecure: nuclear reactors require massive amounts of cooling water, those located along rivers have had to be shut down in times of drought (in recent years in Europe) creating shortages of supply; because nuclear power is so centralized, any reactor site that is incapacitated for any reason will cause a deficit in its network, and this will require purchasing fossil-fuel energy on short notice, or doing without;

(3) slow: it takes so long to build a nuclear power station that this technology cannot really be mounted, nor easily disassembled as the case might be, to respond to changes in the volume and geographical distribution of energy demand;

(4) dangerous: it uses the most physically hazardous substances we know of, though I suppose they do kill germs, and this extreme hazard creates monumental problems of risk management and security; also, the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation is all too real;

(5) expensive: the features noted each add to the expense of the technology, and this cost is considerable in each of the fiscal, political and environmental dimensions; expense is always a relative measure, and my view is that if solar (and related generation and storage) and micro-networks were given the same quantity of government subsidy, and not even for as many decades as nuclear power has enjoyed, we would have a much better system of national electrical power by every criterion imaginable, except that of monopoly control of a societal dependency.

SLA: You mentioned that NIF is presented as the positive answer, in the U.S., to the question many nuclear weapons states are now asking: “can we keep a nuclear weapons arsenal at reduced cost and also bypass the ‘danger’ and ‘political’ disincentives of having them, by eliminating most of the weapons testing infrastructure and workforce, and instead relying on the virtual reality of computer simulations.” Why do you think that those simulations will never be able to replace tests of real life-sized weapons?

MG,Jr.: By definition a simulation is incomplete, it relies on projections and approximations to some of the details that make up a real item and a real phenomenon. The details of the dynamics of ultra-rapid (billions of a second) compression and nuclear fusion of millimeter-scale capsules will have unavoidable differences to the much slower (microseconds) implosion of full-scale nuclear devices. The characteristic length scale of the phenomenon plays a role in determining how the dynamics of the imploding fluid mass will evolve.

Let me give an analogy. The distance over which molecules of air interact by collision (at sea level) is about 60 billionths of a meter, call it lambda. The air friction resisting the motion of an object through the atmosphere is the accumulated effect of molecular collisions: air pushed away by the object in turn collides into surrounding air molecules, and some of these rebound back into the object. The net effect is “drag” caused by the viscosity of air. The effect of this viscosity is most pronounced against the surface of the object, but soon fades away with distance from it (say within thousands of lambdas). In the case of a typical airplane wing, the fluid disturbed by viscous interaction with the wing surface is confined to a relatively thin layer called a boundary layer (which might build up to a few percent of the wing thickness). For many calculations of aeronautical engineering, a slight increase to the thickness of the wing is used to account for the boundary layer of fluid that tends to move with, or ‘stick,’ to the wing, and then the overall lift of the wing is calculated as if this modified shape were moving through a frictionless atmosphere. This method is quite good when the length scale that characterizes the size of the wing is large in comparison to the thickness of the boundary layer. This is easily the case with large wings at high speed, as with our airplanes. However, this method fails when trying to understand the workings of the wings of small insects. Gnats that may be of millimeter scale will be swimming in a viscous soup of an atmosphere, since their wings and bodies are easily within the length over which air viscosity acts.

Because not every force and physical interaction changes its characteristic length scale as the length scale of the object in question is changed, there are inevitable differences in the dynamics of fluid motion, between situations of different size. Another example is the dynamics of planetary atmospheres, like our weather, which is highly influenced by gravity because of the size and mass of the Earth. Yet, gravity has essentially no influence on the dynamics of gnat flight; gnats are nearly suspended in weightlessness, paddling through a three dimensional syrup of atmosphere.

So, micro experiments in fusion will certainly help to refine codes simulating intricate physics, which can be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs, but neither these experiments nor the codes will ever fully account for all the details of the full-scale dynamics. Of course, all that is needed, for the purposes of engineering warheads, is that they be good enough, and that is ultimately determined by the complexity of the warhead designs and the accumulated experience of the weapons designers.

SLA:You mentioned that, in any case, the crucial point is that nuclear weapons are unnecessary for a reasonable national defense. How do you justify that statement? Because of the monstrous effects of their actual use?

MG,Jr.: Let me point you to an article (“Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence“). My basic points: (1) the globalization of world economies makes any nuclear war a permanent loss of wealth to the investor population of world capitalism, so nuclear weapons have lost their strategic value, and (2) the improvements in shooting and bombing accuracy given by the integration of computer, electronics and GPS space technologies makes it unnecessary for advanced military powers to use the massively powerful blasts from nuclear explosions in order to achieve tactical objectives in their colonial wars or wars for dominance against rivals.

SLA: You ask yourself: “Is the investment in NIF as an ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) system prototype a wise public policy, regardless of NIF’s role for nuclear weapons?” You answer by saying that “it depends on the type of society you want to power and when you expect to start doing so.” Why? How do you justify that relation?

MG,Jr.: I can only repeat what I said in the article (“To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?“). Highly concentrated power generation systems serve the needs of narrowly focused capital accumulation at great social expense. Fusion energy systems fit that type, but they will take a very long time and a lot of money to develop.

SLA: You also mention that you prefer to organize society “in a socialist or classless manner, or at least more egalitarian and certainly not corporate-controlled,” and that you would prefer a decentralized national energy supply system, where “the generation, control of, storage and use of energy were all local.” What type of systems would these be? What sources of energy are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: A solar collector unit, perhaps the size of a large refrigerator, that can generate enough heat to power a small Stirling engine that then cranks a generator, and produces as much electricity as a typical wall outlet (115 VAC, 15 A) during four hours a day, and which could be built locally with generic components, could transform the lives of people in Third World villages and rural areas. Imagine having the energy to pump water, refrigerate essential food stores, recharge batteries that provide lighting for nighttime study, run power tools, provide electric heat for cooking, boil and purify water. Such simple and small systems of “gridless green energy” could have a major impact on the conditions of most of humanity, including the people at the bottom of the economic ladders in our First World nations. Fancier versions of such systems (e.g., using the batteries of electric vehicles as storage units of household electricity generated by a solar-photovoltaic system), and micro-networks of generation and storage as mentioned several times, could maintain the level of comfort we have grown accustomed to in the First World, and do so with much less danger and in a much more egalitarian and economically liberating way. There are no physical laws barring such a vision, only the small-mindedness of our greed as institutionalized in our politics.

SLA: You state that we already have all the technical means to implement such a system, a national network of micro-networks or local networks. “Solar energy focused as heat onto pipes carrying oil along the focal axes of parabolic trough collectors, and the oil transferring its heat through a heat exchanger to water, generating steam, which in turn drives a turbine that turns an electric generator, can produce electricity from sunlight with from 1% to 5% efficiency, steadily during the day.” Are you thinking basically of the U.S.? Would it really be posible in other tecnologically less developed societies? Wouldn’t it be necessary to have technological or even geographical conditions that are within reach of very few states?

MG,Jr.: Clearly, the more elaborate and technically refined the nature of solar, wind or hydro systems and the networks connecting generators with storage units and users, the less likely they will be first used in the Third World. But, the general type of thinking behind such systems can be used to build simple examples that are within the reach of less developed societies.

Face it, there isn’t a corner of this globe that is so remote that it hasn’t been reached by the gun trade. Well, why not the solar energy movement? We can assume that there is enough of a population of artisans anywhere, with sufficient hand tools and knowledge that they could fabricate the simplest of solar collectors, ovens and windmills, Stirling motors and even electric generators if they have access to basic materials, and clearly drawn plans or sample units. Anywhere such a local system of energy-from-the-sun is built will become a focal point of new construction of newer and better systems, and these will spread to other sites and other groups of people. Yes, I admit this is a step up from giving a completely helpless and ignorant person in the wilderness a shovel and a cow; but it is not that big of a larger step. And, like the shovel and cow, giving such a person both the knowledge and the essential materials to produce a system that provides a greater quantity of clean energy right at his location is an investment in humanity that can only grow to everyone’s benefit. Read the reports on the energy needs of the Third World written by the United Nations Development Programme (my article on the subject can be read here).

As to geography, most of the Third World is in equatorial latitudes, sunshine may be one of the few things they have in abundance.

SLA: Wind-power, you say, “is the most abundant source of non-fossil non-nuclear energy today.” Do you see any inconvenience in the widespread use of this type of energy?

MG,Jr.: Large wind power arrays are best isolated to sites with little nearby population and frequent winds. An obvious location is away from the shore, for example instead of oil derricks at sea. Small wind-energy modules are already being built, which can be mounted on rooftops and add to the household electrical supply. “Inconveniences” are really just problems of design and engineering, and ultimately a source of satisfaction to the innovators of the technology, who overcome them.

A national system of electrical energy supply will be the integration of solar, wind and hydro generators of micro or residential scale, which are coupled with storage units and use sites by a micro-network, and the micro-networks are then coupled by the types of regional networks we are accustomed to now, which also connect to industrial-scale generator sites (e.g., “solar farms,” “wind farms,” large hydroelectric facilities), in order to create a quilt of overlapping local networks which in total is then a robust, reliable and multiply redundant system of national electrical energy supply.

SLA: From your point of view, the hurdles for change are only political. Is it so? What political hurdles are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: The hurdles are: (1) public awareness of what is truly physically possible — this is the target of my writing, (2) the fear of change and loss of continuity of service (continuity of mindless comfort, as long as one can afford to pay for it), (3) the opposition of powerful capitalist “energy industry” interests, who do not want any change in their profitable modus operandi, and (4) the democratic deficit of the U.S. government (and others), which is held hostage by corporate money and is unresponsive to the public will.

SLA: Please let me ask two final questions. Why do you think Einstein supported the research on atomic energy during the Manhattan Project?

MG,Jr.: He was influenced by people he knew and trusted (Leo Szilard, like Einstein, a Jew), and were afraid the world might indeed succumb to the domination of Hitler and the Nazis. One has to remember how formidable the Third Reich was at its peak in 1939. Europe had essentially capitulated to it: France would fall in 1940, England would be isolated and on the defensive, and Stalinist Russia was formally in compliance with its non-aggression treaty with the Third Reich. The very idea of democracy and free society seem threatened. The thought of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Militarist Japan (in China since 1937) dominating and having their types of mass oppression spread over the globe was inducement enough for Einstein to urge the one major power left, the United States, to invest in the physics that could turn the tide of the world war: the atom bomb. Great fears give rise to great weapons.

SLA: Could you imagine a world without nuclear weapons? What realistic steps could be undertaken to bring us nearer to that ideal?

MG,Jr.: Yes, I can imagine a world free of nuclear weapons. The more people become self-confident in their own lives, and free themselves from their personal fears, the less likely they will be fooled by fear-inducing propaganda, which is the main tool of social control. People who have liberated their minds in this way are best able to become aware of the realities of their national societies, and to become advocates for the egalitarian betterment of their societies. Part of this betterment will include alterations to personal lifestyle, undertaken freely so as to remove oneself (as well as one can) from the support of imperialism and anti-environmental and exploitative capitalism. One then is able to drop prejudices and broaden one’s sympathy to include all who suffer in the world. At this point, your actions in the cause of creating a just and authentically peaceful world are a matter of taking advantage of whatever opportunities the accidents of birth and the vagaries of fate make available to you. Others will be influenced by your example, and in this way the effectiveness of the cause spreads.

A political movement to bring a nation to implement nuclear disarmament, and to then urge other nations to do likewise, must be populated by individuals who have gone some way along the process I described, above. The generosity of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, they being replaced by compassion and respect as the basis of international relations, can only arise from a political movement that reflects these ideals as the general sense of the personal values of its people. A people obsessed with their own gain and their entertainment, and living in fantasy worlds of parallel isolation enveloping them from their laptop screens, is a mass of atomized disengagement, a sea in which the managers of the corporatocracy wash away their cares and sink their wreckage.

I could recommend the philosophy of Epicurus, or Zen. Most basically, I would ask anyone to realize that we are living in a world that would be paradise if we cooperatively chose to make it so. Learn what you fear, and overcome it; then be grateful for life and express it. The rest will come naturally.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joints chiefs of staff of the US armed forces opined publicly that this was a sufficient mass from which to extract the fissile portion to build one atomic bomb, and that a nuclear-(one) armed Iran would be a “very, very bad outcome.” Robert Gates, the US Secretary of Defense, viewed the situation as less alarming, stating that Iran was “not close” to fabricating a weapon.

It requires little imagination to anticipate the obvious lobbying stratagems of the many Treasury Department parasites who cast the Persian uranium horde as a dire threat that can only be allayed by offering the nation’s financial jugular to deep penetration by their zealous fangs, and perhaps to also loose some cathartic aerial bombardments upon the Iranians, that like Zeus’s thunderbolts will dissipate an Olympian distemper. Nuclear weapons contractors, Zionists and American militarists are the ultimate automatons of reductio ad absurdum, regardless of the information thrown into them, their concluding outputs are invariably the same: give us more.

So, for now we bypass the mirage of policy discussion regarding today’s Iranian uranium horde, and instead describe some physical facts about Iran’s bomb-making potential.

Uranium is a slightly radioactive, silver-grey metal 70% denser than lead, which appears naturally as oxides in mineral ores. As with a number of other elements, there are several forms of uranium atoms, which are called isotopes. All uranium atoms have 92 electrons (particles with 1 unit of electrical charge, and with negative polarity) and 92 protons (particles with 1 unit of electrical charge, and with positive polarity). Each isotope of uranium has a different number of neutrons (electrically neutral particles) in its nucleus, and this number ranges from 141 to 146.

It happens that the mass of an electron is slight compared to that of a proton or neutron, and the masses of these latter two types of particles is quite close. So, one can characterize the weight of an isotope by the combination of its total proton mass and total neutron mass (this is slightly inexact, but good enough for a general understanding). The number of protons is called the “atomic number,” and the combined number of protons and neutrons is called the “atomic weight.” So, uranium has an atomic number of 92, and an atomic weight, depending on isotope, of between 233 and 238. (See the End Notes for superfluous details).

The natural isotopic distribution of uranium is: U238 at 99.284%, U235 at 0.711% and U234 at 0.0058% (the sum is slightly off 100% due to rounding).

The nucleus of any atom can be ruptured when impacted by a sufficiently energetic sub-atomic particle or quanta of electromagnetic radiation (high energy gamma rays, cosmic rays). This is nuclear fission. Nuclei heavier than an iron nucleus are less tightly bound as they are increasingly massive. It is easier for them to undergo fission.

Because the neutron is electrically neutral, it will not be deflected by an atom’s protons and electrons, so it is a very effective projectile for initiating nuclear fission. While any atomic nucleus can be made to fission by some form of high energy impact, the term “fissionable” is generally used in an engineering sense for those elements that undergo fission when struck by neutrons.

It is interesting that for all naturally occurring isotopes except one, the neutrons initiating fission must have high energy (e.g., 14 MeV). The exceptional isotope is U235, it will undergo fission when impacted by neutrons of low energy (e.g., 1 MeV). Fissioning nuclei can fragment into multiple parts, and emit neutrons of low energy. This is why a mass of U235 can sustain fission chain reactions, while masses of no other natural isotope can.

The term “fissile” is used to designate materials that can sustain fission chain reactions — materials that fission when impacted by low-energy neutrons emitted from prior fission reactions. Aside from the naturally occurring U235, fissile materials are artificially “bred” in nuclear reactors, the main ones being: Plutonium-239 (Pu239), Pu241 and U233. Pu239 is bred when U238 captures a neutron (and rearranges its now heavier nucleus). This same process sequentially produces Pu240 and Pu241. U233 is bred from Thorium-232. There are fifteen actinoid (rare earth) elements from which fissile isotopes can be produced; uranium and thorium are the only naturally occurring actinoids. Fissile uranium and plutonium are the most convenient materials for use as nuclear reactor fuel and in nuclear explosives.

Refining nuclear fuel begins with the extraction of elemental uranium from mineral ores. Since the elemental mass is less than 1% U235, it is put through an enrichment process, which exploits the mass difference between U238 and U235. The enriched portion is reactor fuel with about 3% to 4% U235, while the remainder is slightly more concentrated U238 called depleted uranium (DU). It is important to note that a major investment in both energy and infrastructure is required to be able to produce reactor fuel, a point about massive CO2 emissions that is glossed over by proponents of nuclear power as a “green” technology.

We can see that if Iran now has 1,010 kilograms of reactor fuel, then this mass will contain a portion of U235 equivalent to between 30 kg to 40 kg. If one had this quantity of U235 as a contiguous mass rather than distributed throughout 1,010 kilos (over a ton) of uranium metal, then one could cut and machine the U235 to shape parts (“the pit”) for a fission bomb. Nuclear weapons-grade fuel may be more then 90% U235, and refining reactor fuel to this extent is a lengthy and extraordinarily expensive continuation of the enrichment process that yielded reactor-grade fuel with 3% to 4% U235. So, Robert Gates is quite correct to say Iran is “not close” to having a nuclear explosive (what we normally think of with the phrase “nuclear weapon”).

A state-of-the-art bomb production industry can make an atomic bomb from 10 kg of weapons-grade U235. As the engineering refinement of and control over the implosion and criticality dynamics of the bomb decrease, the quantity of fissile material needed increases. So, an inexperienced weapons design team might have to use 20 kg to 30 kg of weapons-grade U235 to ensure their device would produce “nuclear yield.” The incredibly inefficient Little Boy gun-type uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima had 64 kg of U235, of which 0.7 kg underwent fission, and only 0.6 grams were transformed into energy (by E = m C-squared). The blast yield of Little Boy was equivalent to that of between 13 to 18 kilotons of TNT. The Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb dropped on Nagasaki had 6.2 kg of Pu239, of which 1.2 kg underwent fission, and under one gram was transformed into energy. Fat Man’s explosive yield was 21 kT. If Iran’s U235 were to be concentrated to weapons-grade material, they would have enough for at least one bomb.

Electricity can be generated from a power reactor that “burns” nuclear fuel. The fission energy released as the motion of fission fragments is captured by the mass of the reactor core, which heats up, and in turn boils water to drive steam turbines that turn electric generators (there are also other types of reactors that exploit the heating of the core). As the mass of reactor fuel burns, it accumulates substances transmuted by nuclear reactions, such as Pu239, Pu241 and other radioactive isotopes. Some of these new substances poison the process of fission chain reactions, because they absorb neutrons. It is this effect, rather than a complete depletion of U235, which limits the utility of a fuel mass. Spent fuel may still be 0.5% U235.

Fissile material bred from uranium fuel in reactors can be harvested (“reprocessed”). An advanced fission weapons program will breed plutonium from uranium, and then enrich the plutonium to a weapons-grade purity of Pu239 or Pu241. This is the kind of program carried on by the major nuclear powers. Iran is nowhere near this. But, it is possible it has done “test tube sized” experiments that attempt to breed and extract trace amounts of plutonium from uranium reactor fuel. Any scientific establishment working to learn how to reprocess spent fuel so as to ameliorate the problems of long-term storage and disposal (and/or to design breeder cycles) will of necessity be working on methods for extracting plutonium.

The practical energy yield or “burn up” from a mass of reactor fuel is characterized by the number of 24 hour days at 1 megawatt output of thermal power per metric ton of uranium metal. Typical numbers for existing reactors are 30,000 to 40,000 MW days per metric ton of fuel mass. Let us say the Iranians acquire or build a reactor with 36,500 MW-day/tonne. This is equivalent to 100 MW-year/tonne (ignoring leap year corrections). Given their 1.01 tonne horde, they could expect an energy yield of 101 MW-year. Now, a megawatt of power is equal to 1,341 horsepower, the power of a moderate train locomotive, an early WW2 airplane engine, a good sized charter fishing boat, and a standby emergency power unit for a campus or moderate industrial site. Nuclear power for supplying electricity to the electrical power grid of a small nation or a national region would more likely flow at a rate of 100 MW to 1 GW (gigawatt, equal to 1000 MW). Our hypothetical 100 MW-year/tonne system would use up the 1.01 tonne fuel supply in 1 year and 3.7 days of continuous 100 MW operation, or in 37 days of continuous 1 GW operation. It is evident that the Iranian uranium fuel supply is only a token of what would be needed to operate a useful civilian power system. The most likely application of the present Iranian uranium reactor fuel supply is in powering a small research reactor that is used to enable experimentation in all aspects of nuclear power technology and reactor fuel management and reprocessing.

Are the Iranians trying to produce an atomic bomb? They should be, given their history of experiencing invasions and warfare (Alexander the Great, Mark Antony, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Imperial Russia, the British Empire, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Saddam Hussein); their ballistic missile proximity to the Eurasian nuclear powers of Russia, China, India and Pakistan; and to that nuclear-armed Middle East enclave of furious exceptionalism — Israel; their enviable quantities of petroleum and natural gas; and the entrenched hostility of the United States imperialists, miffed at the Iranian refusal to submit to its possessive control and to a cultural deflowering.

The Iranians say they are not building a nuclear weapon, and you cannot disprove their claim on the basis of physical evidence or physics estimates. It does make business sense for Iran to save its petroleum resources for the export market, and to increase that profitability by powering its domestic economy with its own independent system of nuclear power. Also, given the world thirst for oil, it does make sense to develop an alternative now for powering a post-fossil fuel economy. Disbelief of the Iranian characterization of their nuclear energy work is based on political agendas (e.g., Zionism), and simple prejudice aping principled mistrust (e.g., neo-con imperialism). It IS possible the Iranians have not been truthful about their intent, but it is not possible to discern this from physical considerations. And, we must be clear that the Iranians are completely within their rights (by treaties signed) to pursue their nuclear energy work for the purposes they have stated: civilian electrical power.

What is clear is that the physics of bomb-making and the physics of civilian nuclear power are inextricably entwined beyond any possibility of chaste separation that would fully satisfy the political desires of competing states. It is also clear that any nation’s investment in an independent nuclear power system is a de facto national defense program, because the threat of it acquiring nuclear weapons is implicit and physically embedded in the development work for the technology.

What must also become clear is that investment in nuclear energy technology, especially if carried forward to weapons development, is a detriment to the social good because it drains enormous resources that could be used to improve the health and well-being of the public. Some of this public detriment will be due to the ambitions of a national leadership whose machinations for greater power lead to the diversion of national wealth into military programs — and nuclear power is intrinsically a central government and a military program. By the very nature of nuclear material, nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel reprocessing, the central government must control the technology for the sake of security. Civilian nuclear power is at best an attempt by the government to spread the costs of maintaining the nuclear fuel — and nuclear bomb — infrastructure (e.g., a ‘non-bomb’ military application is nuclear-powered warships). This is why the U.S. and Russia have sought, and still seek, client states whose civilian nuclear power systems they would fuel and reprocess (e.g., South Korea).

That Iran does not wish to be such a client state is interpreted by the Washington imperialists as an act of defiance, a declaration of nuclear armament building. This independence on nuclear matters is entirely within Iran’s rights as spelled out in the test ban and non-proliferation treaties. This act of independence may also be an Iranian virtual nuclear weapons program that is a purely psychological illusion, and would be judged successful if the degree of caution and hesitation it introduces into the US approach to Iran outweighs the inevitable increase in US irritation with Iran.

The hostility of large powerful states toward smaller, weaker ones may justifiably motivate some of those lesser states to explore the deterrent potential of nuclear arms. Like the spines of a sea urchin, or the noxious taste of a milkweed (Monarch) butterfly, a small credible capability in nuclear arms may offer significant protection against large unrelenting predators. The entire world can see how gingerly the U.S. treats North Korea, with its puny near-dud atomic bomb (assuming it has another) as compared to, say, Venezuela or Syria or Cuba, which evidently lack nuclear arms.

What is so stupid about US policy regarding nuclear developments in other states is that its ham-fisted belligerence reinforces the fears of small nations that decide to divert resources from economic development to the sprouting of nuclear-armed political spines; and what is so sad is that the objectification of that U.S. hostility and that subject nation’s fear into those armament spines is a heartless tax sapping national wealth that is sorely needed to meet basic human needs. The I Ching might have put it this way: the hostility of the great is the impoverishment of the weak.

END NOTES

The actual physical mass of an atom is the product of its atomic weight — which recall is simply the number of its combined protons and neutrons — multiplied by an “atomic mass unit,” (abbreviated as AMU), which is a precisely defined quantity that we will round for convenience to 1.66/(10 to the 24th power) grams. So, an atom of U238 has a mass of 3.95/(10 to the 22nd power) grams, an exceedingly small mass.

A macroscopic quantity of 238 grams (about half a pound) of pure U238 will contain 6.022 x (10 to the 23rd power) atoms. This last number is called Avogadro’s Number. It is an interesting fact that any pure isotopic mass whose quantity in grams is numerically equal to its atomic weight (the number of combined protons and neutrons in one atom) will contain Avogadro’s Number of atoms.

The numerical value of the AMU is the inverse of the numerical value of Avogadro’s Number.

However, it is often the case that governments see the personal freedoms of their citizens as impediments, liabilities, and threats to its power. This thrust is usually labeled “maintaining order.” To this end, governments will organize specialized units of labor called police into enforcement agencies, equip them with instruments of coercion, and shield them with legal protections. Admittedly, the realities of human nature, and the wide spectrum of observed human behavior justifies some of this effort.

In our capitalist societies, the maintenance of social order has become both an industry and an infrastructure. When these operate to protect and even advance individual freedoms, human rights and personal safety, then they justify their methods and their existences. This is not uniformly the case, as is too painfully obvious to many who have witnessed or endured the abuses of police and prosecutorial powers by careerists advancing their personal agendas. For this reason, society justly demands that there be a rather intrusive oversight of police, judicial and prosecutorial professionals, and many restrictions on the technologies and methods they are allowed to use. The purpose of a justice system of authentic social value is to achieve 100% success at safeguarding the rights of the innocent; it is not to achieve 100% success at ensuring the punishment of the guilty. The latter goal demands a continuous and significant sacrifice of innocent people. Such sacrifice is unconscionable in any justice system that includes capital punishment.

Just where is the boundary between lawful freedom of assembly and the unlawful “right to riot?” (As an aside, we must allow for the logical possibility — even the social necessity in extreme cases like the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza Strip — of a lawful right to riot). The traditional police technologies for containing unruly assemblies, lawful and unlawful, include: megaphones (public address systems), truncheons (sticks), plastic shields and body armor, deployment on horseback, high pressure jets of water, tear-gas and small arms fire. In more recent times, lightly armored assault vehicles (police tanks) have also been deployed.

Over the years, police responses to public assemblies have caused fatalities of innocents, spurring research to arm police with minimally-lethal technology that is effective at social control. From such efforts came the mechanical technologies of water jets (fire hoses), tear-gas bombs and sprays, rubberized truncheons, and most recently rubber bullets. Also, electrostatics was exploited to devise the Tasers in use today. Viewed from an authoritarian perspective, these are certainly improvements over straightforward military firepower, but still, people have been badly injured and killed by these “softer” forms of coercion.

The conundrum of finding gentle coercive force technologies against public assemblies is now seeking its answer through electronic technologies, specifically microwave and laser broadcast power. The National Institute for Justice, the research arm (or “Q Branch,” in James Bond parlance) of the US Department of Justice, is now testing candidate systems of assembly dispersal and control. Police forces will eventually be equipped with centimeter-wave microwave beam broadcast systems, similar to one devised by the US Army, to heat skin at a distance and elicit a flight reaction.

A second, and better developed device of remote control torture is a bulky “rifle” that combines visible light and infrared lasers to incapacitate people by blinding them for a period of time (“dazzlers“), as well as being able to heat skin uncomfortably.

Obviously, any non-lethal form of coercion is more easily used as an instrument of torture, for example during arrests, interrogations, and in prisons. The surreptitious and deniable misuse of such weapons by rogue law enforcement individuals would be harder to detect because of the minimal aftereffects.

Both the convenience of remote control torture and the absence of lasting physical evidence of its occurrence make these insidious weapons of authoritarian control over personal freedom as envisioned by the contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

The best protection against such weapons would be the elevation of the social consciousness and political maturity of the citizens, generally, to achieve a greater sense of community, to both: ensure popular political power over the control and enforcement agencies of government, and to populate those agencies with individuals whose first allegiance is the protection of people’s freedoms rather than the protection of government power and its careerists.

Otherwise, we are burning away the actuality of the First Amendment. We are trimming our right of assembly to self-contained gatherings that cause no political disturbance, to virtual assemblies on the internet that create little notice, that cannot offer the challenge to entrenched power that is carried by the actual massed presence of our physical selves, united.

Student #1:

I am twenty years old and go to the University of C, studying for a degree in business and technology. With all that is happening around me, I am no longer sure what I aspire to be. I wish to help bring the change to this world that will lead to [the social and political policies this publication advocates]. I was considering trying to become a technician in some field, but am unsure of what. I know that most politicians cannot get things done simply because they are not trained to do so; and am asking for your guidance as to where I should point myself. I’m a bilingual college student who works as a bank teller, and quite frankly, the more I learn about banking the less I want to work in it; the more I learn about the monetarism we are a part of, the more I want to change it. It’s terrifying, when I ask some of my peers what they know of our government, or how our money system works, or about world affairs. I usually find an overwhelming ignorance, or just lack of interest because they don’t think they are part of the global community. In fact most people my age could care less about what goes on outside this country or how this government handles public affairs. They are usually just interested in pop culture, or where the next party will be, or who has the most impressive weed. I am disdainful of most of the people in my generation, who are absolutely clueless of what the world is really like. I have a different perspective since I come from a different country and I have traveled quite a bit. But, I do not know what I should do. I am lost and in need of guidance, or another person’s perspective. Would you reply in a sincere and honest way to this question? Is there any hope for change and what can I do to be a part of it?

Response #1:

The best thing you can do for society is to become good at what you love doing most. Naturally, I am thinking about legal and humane applications of your developed skills. Each of us has some activity that we are naturally drawn to, that excites us, that we can feel passionate about, and that would give our lives meaning even if we had to live in poverty and obscurity to engage in it. For some, it is music, perhaps singing or composing — think of Mozart and Maria Callas. For others it can be mathematics or scientific or nature studies — think of Charles Darwin or Einstein. For others it can be craftsmanship by hand, like potters and calligraphers honored by Chinese and Japanese tradition. For others it might be writing, of many varieties. The point is that you must first determine what it is that you REALLY want to do with your mind and hands, in the day-to-day, regardless of whatever circumstances might exist in the world outside. Find your avocation.

The next step is to decide what type and quantity of education you need — and are willing to put up with — in order to develop your avocation. Simply put, if you love doing it, you will be willing to put up with the work needed to learn how to do it well. This is the “monastery” and “apprenticeship” stage of a consciously self-directed life. This is the period where artists and musicians wait on tables to earn the money needed to pay those exacting and expensive teachers, and for the art supplies and/or gigs they need to hone their art. This could be on-the-job training, and it could be graduate school in the Ivy League. The point is, get the education you need to hone the skills for practicing the mechanics of YOUR passion.

Eventually you “finish school” and have to make it on your own, hopefully on the basis of being paid for practicing your craft. Perhaps your passion is writing, specifically in the field of history, but you find yourself employed in a bank or insurance office because you have to support a family and because the employer finds your ability to write sufficiently applicable to preparing financial reports and business documents. You would much rather be a columnist at a big city newspaper, but you just can’t write as fast and as good — within the confines of the paper’s orthodoxy — as the people they already have. Your challenge is twofold:

1, how to ensure the support of the family (which might be minimally yourself), and

2, how to apply the skills of your passion (your avocation) to the betterment of society?

This is such a grand challenge, that most people can’t do it.

First step, be forgiving of yourself. It is not possible for one individual to take on the problems of the world, to feel responsibility for all the ills and misery around you. This is too much, it crushes the individual. Second step is to not give up, to develop your understanding of the world and society around you, so you can perhaps come to see opportunities where you could contribute your skills (your passions) and they would find a welcome, and possibly even reward you monetarily, so as to help with part 1 of your career challenge.

Beyond this point, it is simply effort and refinement.

So, can you solve world hunger by becoming an ace potter in some country hamlet? No, but you might develop into a good teacher of young children working with clay, of adults regaining use of hands and minds after strokes, or you might devise some cost-effective containment devices or strategies for people in poor rural communities who have to make their own items — and clay is a natural. My point is that if you actively think about what human needs exist and how you could apply what you know to them — at some level even a very local and personal one — that you will increase the portion of your working energy that goes into bettering society, instead of just being a mindless “consumer” whose total working life is gobbled up to keep running some capitalist, socially-parasitic system.

The better you are at what you do, the more likely you will be able to apply your skills at a higher level, and to affect more people.

So much for generalities.

It sounds as if you have some economics knowledge. If so, and it interests you, there is always a need for “experts” in development who work to devise methods for poor and peasant communities to improve their economies in sustainable ways, and to keep their independence from foreign multi-nationals (you know, “globalization”). This is not easy at all, and the need is great. Naturally, well-trained economists usually prefer getting the big bucks working for banks and big financial firms, which aim to exploit those peasants (along with everybody else). If one could work in such a setting and make big bucks by funneling investors into ethical portfolios, and then also use your own fat commissions ethically, and/or to fund social improvement projects of your own, then you would be applying MBA skills in a very worthy way.

Look into the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNICEF for descriptions of economics applied to improve rural/poor/3rd world societies. I have read reports about the energy needs of the world’s poor, a significant problem that cries out for economists with talent, and an interest in simple energy technology (for more, http://www.idiom.com/~garcia/EFHD_01.htm).

If you add a facility with languages (being multi-lingual) to any set of skills, then you become much more effective.

Given the economic circumstances today (impending depression) you can easily see that teachers, advisors and advocates who show people how to get out of debt, stay out of debt, and ultimately produce and trade for what they need without having to go through corporations at all — for food, water, energy, light, heat, furnishings — would be a boon to poor people, which is to say most people. Could you devise such schemes of personal financial independence for the non-rich?

I’m working on ideas for generating electricity directly from sunlight, using a “small” machine, so individuals could reduce or even eliminate their dependence on utility companies (perhaps foreign, and perhaps exploitative) and power lines (so, for remote villages), if they could also simplify their lives sufficiently to conserve a good amount of power. Physically, it is possible. Practical?, convenient?, reliable?, still working on it. Maybe I’ll arrive at a breakthrough someday, and maybe nothing will ever come of it, but I’m trying, and I’m using my passion for math and physics. How successful am I at changing the world? I’m forgiving on myself on that point, but I’m trying, and I’m using my passions (which include writing) for much of my time.

Read the book Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl (easily found). It is short, and shows how we humans need meaning in our lives. When we are engaged in what gives us meaning, we can literally live through anything. The philosopher-folklorist Joseph Campbell (book: The Hero With A Thousand Faces) also talks on this theme.

I can’t tell you what to do or study until you identify what gives your life meaning. What is it you feel you are driven to do. Once you know that, nurture it, develop it. And then try, ethically, to apply it in the world. Measure success by the level of satisfaction in your life, NOT by externalities like money, titles, attention and status. Develop a sense of self-respect that can’t be bought (and beware, because it will “cost” you in those externalities). The only success is to lead a life of meaning, even if invisible to others; the only failure is to never experience the thrill of what you were meant to do.

Student #2:

Hello! My name is M. Right now, I’m an undergraduate physics student at O University. I’m finishing up my senior year and I’m getting very excited about continuing my education in graduate school and eventually getting my Ph.D. The plan is to pursue my research in plasma physics. However, I’m always finding conflicts with these ambitions. I chose this path because I really do love physics and math and wanted to do something with my life that was beneficial to the earth. I chose plasma physics as a way to research fusion energy, thinking that this would be the cleanest possible goal for the planet. But whenever I speak about this to other “radical” friends, they kind of look down on me. I’ve gotten a lot of criticism from friends and acquaintances. I read [this publication and MG, Jr. articles], and love seeing a physicist that shares all of my political ideas and feelings about the world. So as a physicist and thinker, is the path I’ve chosen a bad one? I know that you may not be able to make that call for me, nor am I expecting you to plan my life. I just wanted to ask for your opinion.

Response #2:

You put your question very clearly and succinctly. Unfortunately, I do not see how to give as clear or concise an answer.

It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868)

On April 22, 1970, I attended a lecture in my undergraduate physics class, on nuclear fission and fusion. Professor Walter Whales became quite engrossed in his presentation, which became an hour-long tutorial on the design of a fission bomb. It was fascinating. To see how all the individual textbook phenomena fit together in an intricate, interrelated fashion to produce one awesome effect was just marvelous, a private viewing behind nature’s curtains at a vast panorama of hidden depth, an initiation. At the end of his lecture, Professor Whales was struck by an amusing realization and, with a smile and all his chalk-board spherical shell diagrams behind him, said “What a thing to be talking about on Earth Day!” I left the lecture hall that day, walking onto the sunny spring-day college green, crowded with students, mini-skirts, Beatles music, and the celebratory atmosphere of the first Earth Day, and realized my course in life: to study plasma physics to prepare myself to be in the first generation of chief-engineers of the fusion energy plants that would just begin coming into service within 15 years, by 1985. Energy for the people, a revolution in freedom for the world, perhaps even the beginning of the end of world poverty, hunger, even war. This was one of the most ecstatic days in my life, even my girlfriend was sweet to me. Joseph Campbell called such times “peak experiences,” when you are at your best, and the world smiles on you.

Thirty-eight years later, I am the same person with the same basic dreams, only by now all the hidden assumptions I had as a 20-year-old have been uncovered, and most of them discarded as erroneous. Today, my belief is that simple solar technology, which can be fabricated locally in the 3rd World without anything “special,” except for a little knowledge encapsulated in a simple blueprint or a working model as guides, is how the greatest degree of energy independence is to be provided. I hope to put more time and energy into this project this new year, because it moves me. What I have learned from physics is how to marvel more deeply at the wonder of nature, at the genius of the evolved interrelatedness we are enmeshed in. Still, if some university or college, or even an eccentric millionaire were to pay me to work at solving physics problems involving fluids, electromagnetic effects and plasmas, and just for the sake of the art, I would jump at the chance. I was lucky enough to spend years of my time engrossed in such study — and meditation — and earn my daily bread doing so: ivory tower, rent-free. But, I’m considered a has-been now, my methods and my focus seen as passé.

And, I am passé because I rebel at the likely purposes to which my thoughts of plasma physics would be put to, were I paid to generate such thoughts; I rebel at any suggestion I channel my thinking to the projects most employers of physicists would have; and I rebel against the popular methods of career advancement tolerated among professionals of all types. Finally, I rebel against the realization that I can never be a teacher, because I cannot cater to an audience impatient to have their tickets punched so they can move on in their career trips, and impatient if I do not supply classroom entertainment to relieve their instantly available boredom. I’m a grumpy old man before my time. What I do have, in exchange for being cast off from my former professional associations and their rich resources, is the freedom to pursue my interests without the restraint of fearing to appear foolish, or worrying about getting published — accepted, included. Even if they never reach anyone else, my ideas can fill me with excitement, insight and wonder. THIS is what you want to ensure you experience, at least a few times, when you choose to immerse yourself in a science life. Remember this for those times your career is in a slump; because there are many careerists in science but far fewer real intellectual successes.

It is impossible for any single human being to resolve the conflicts of the world within the limited scope of their personal life. If you try to arrange your activity to have a “zero carbon footprint,” to be “socially responsible,” even 100% certified organic ahimsa harmless pure-loving good, you will go insane. If you are a born American citizen, you are de facto already guilty of the original sin of being a biological unit in the Earth-chewing genocidal fascism of American capitalism. It is unreasonable to expect any rational human being to assume such guilt and forsake all to become a naked sadhu in India. The rational course is to recognize advantages the luck of birth has bestowed on you and to use them to help you develop yourself to some personally rewarding and socially useful purpose. Consider the Parable of the Talents (if you have read New Testament stories). The mere fact of your birth bestows on you the right to seek personal fulfillment, and the right to be creative. If you excel in the pursuit of your deepest intellectual interests, your quest for beauty, and in the understanding of nature, you will have made the best use of your life-energy that world society could ask for. If pondering physics problems is where your heart lies, and you would be willing to wash up as a middle-aged derelict with a sufficient income for simple survival till bucket-kicking, so you can ponder these wonders for several decades during a professional career, then why ask what else? You can easily choose a “safe” course, or something that is more easily bullshitted as “goody-two-shoes” to all those unimportant people you feel necessary to keep up appearances for, and have a boring life and even still end up a professional derelict. Don’t compromise on what gives you fulfillment. If you know what it is do it, if you are uncertain what it is, find it and then stick with it. Life is short, and we all die, the only victory over death is to reach it having experienced what you were uniquely meant to do and enjoy. “Work out your salvation with diligence,” as Buddha said with his dying breath.

With your physics passion aflame, you go out with a freshly minted Ph.D. (assuming all the politics and bullshit of grad school didn’t kill your resolve with disgust), and what do you find? The people who pay for physics want bombs, guns, and money (these latter are usually advertised as educational institutions). There may be a few other outlets for physics talent, but by and large they all connect back to US government funding, and this is not charitable — whatever they say (even “pure physics” and “educational” funding is for maintaining a “pipeline” of new-young physics talent for the many military-oriented jobs). Physicists are paid to codify natural phenomena to the benefit of control-oriented agencies. Today, this means the product is some computer code that simulates physical effects or controls technological mechanisms that interact with the natural world, or other technological systems, for the purposes of monitoring and control. The actual physics minutia you would have to ponder may be very interesting, like gun barrel erosion, or shock wave propagation through varied media, or the hypervelocity dynamics of shaped charges, but the ultimate purposes of the exploration can be very inhumane. You become (or remain) a human being, instead of being just a physics expert automaton, when you take some responsibility for the purposes of the work. This is the hardest part of sustaining a career. If you ignore your portion of responsibility — and this is the overwhelmingly popular choice among professional scientists — then you reduce yourself to a tool and a hypocrite. A tool being a hypocrite is only possible because in being an employed Ph.D., a professional scientist, the tool has proved it has the cranial capacity to know that such a demand of social responsibility exists for it. I dwell on this point because most physicists I knew were in denial about their hypocrisy.

Pretty grim choice, huh? On the one hand seek your bliss in a physics career, and on the other the inescapability of being an agent of the Empire. The only out I know is what the ancient Chinese called “human heartedness,” a recognition of the realities of daily life and the limits of any human’s powers. You have a right to make a decent living, to be able to support a family, to participate in the society of your times. It is not possible to reconcile all the contradictions (between personal life and world politics) crossing through your life, with the exception of a few charmed individuals (and it is best to assume you are not one of them). Of necessity, the feeding of your family and the maintenance of your sanity cannot be done to the satisfaction of everybody. You follow the most honorable course when you recognize these unavoidable disparities, and you conduct yourself mindful of the ideals, compassionate to the people you know (like your family, who will be directly affected by your actions), and honest about your stances. So, you balance your personal “take” from the world and your “give” to the world, in managing your career and in supporting whatever it is you choose to support with it. Who can really judge you but yourself? As long as you are honest with yourself, you will know if you have been a Machiavellian careerist bullshitter, or a person doing their best to honor their creativity while striking an ethical and compassionate balance in an amoral world, dominated by cruel and selfish attitudes.

I cannot know what the specifics of your career should be. Perhaps you’ll be the next Einstein, and we would be grateful that US military money sustained you, so we could receive your wisdom and value it down the ages. Perhaps, you’ll be a physics teacher, cranking out generations of recruits for the imperial forces, and having a brief period of time to influence each student, perhaps to become more intellectually honest, perhaps to become more rational, perhaps to just get homework done on time, and this can add to the overall good to society. And, perhaps you’ll just be another troglodyte in the imperial armaments industries, and the most social good anyone will see from you will be that you kept yourself off the streets, supported a family even if only a bunch of strays saved from the city pound, and lent your company to some well-intentioned groups and artistic circles. If you live mindfully (a concept written about by Thich Nhat Hanh), then it is inevitable that your big physicist brain will question the ongoing phenomena of your life and times, and you can devise many opportunities for you to “do better” in terms of your own character, and as karma-trailing actions for our world.

The bottom line: it is your life to live, and your life to choose how to live. Honor your creativity and do what brings ecstasy and peace to your consciousness. Do this with enthusiasm, and mindfully. Be aware of your karma, the impact of your actions on others, and be honest about taking justifiable responsibility. Be good to yourself, remember you are only human, not Prometheus, so don’t shoulder all the problems of the world. We humans are never perfect, we are just monkeys with bigger brains. So monkey around, do your best, and after all is said and done the best judgment you can possibly get is: you were never perfect, just a monkey with a bigger brain, monkeying around most happily.

Give my regards to the future.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1946): “I have no doubt, that unless big nations shed their desire of exploitation and the spirit of violence of which war is the natural expression and the atom bomb the inevitable consequence, there is no hope for peace in the world”,

Bertrand Russell (1955): “In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them”, (from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto),

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967): “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.”

The policy-makers of the major atomic powers (the permanent members of the UN Security Council) viewed any “ban the bomb” unilateral nuclear disarmament sentimentality as foolishly naïve. However, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they recognized the value of regulating their nuclear-armed Cold War and improving emergency communications between heads-of-state, to help prevent an accidental nuclear war. These “rules of the game” have been elaborated in three significant treaties.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned above-ground nuclear explosions — atmospheric weapons tests — by the signatories. Most countries have signed and ratified this treaty; notable exceptions are the People’s Republic of China, France and North Korea.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 binds its nuclear-armed parties to refrain from transferring nuclear weapons technology to non-nuclear states; its non-nuclear parties agree not to acquire nuclear weapons; the right to develop civilian nuclear power is affirmed; and a vague commitment to eventual nuclear disarmament is also promised. All nations except four are parties to this treaty (189 parties), the exceptions being India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 bans all nuclear explosions, whether undersea, underground, above-ground, atmospheric or in space. There are 180 signatories to the CTBT (nuclear and non-nuclear states). This treaty will go into effect after nine more of 44 specifically named nuclear-capable states sign and ratify; the nine hold-outs include the United States, the People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Within the last two years a new chorus has added their voices to the call for “a world free of nuclear weapons”:

Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage — to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world… We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal…¹

Progress must be facilitated by a clear statement of our ultimate goal. Indeed, this is the only way to build the kind of international trust and broad cooperation that will be required to effectively address today’s threats. Without the vision of moving toward zero, we will not find the essential cooperation required to stop our downward spiral… The U.S. and Russia, which possess close to 95% of the world’s nuclear warheads, have a special responsibility, obligation and experience to demonstrate leadership, but other nations must join.²

These new converts to “nuclear weapons-zero” may surprise you: George P. Shultz (Reagan Administration secretary of state from 1982 to 1989), William J. Perry (Clinton Administration secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997), Henry A. Kissinger (Nixon Administration national security advisor and secretary of state from 1969 to 1973, then Ford Administration secretary of state from 1973 to 1977) and Sam Nunn (chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1987 to 1995). Their two op-eds have many endorsements from former officials of the military-industrial-congressional complex, and even foreign ex-government officials.

Why are these elite former Cold Warriors now ready to ban the bomb? We can discount the possibility they’ve all experienced a “satori” for peace, or a sudden anti-imperial moral transformation like Saint Paul (more on this later). The new enthusiasm for nuclear weapons-zero must spring from two sources: the nature of reality and the nature of ego. First, consider reality.

The major nuclear powers could never use nuclear weapons in disputes among themselves. However you imagine such a scenario playing out, the “winner” would emerge with devastating damage, and very likely a permanent loss of political power and economic capability. The nuclear war would be an abrupt transition from a former level of “greatness” to a subsequent lesser state; an advantage to non-combatant rivals. Similarly, a war between major economic powers, one armed with nuclear weapons and the other conventionally, would still diminish the economic viability of the nuclear-armed victor because today’s advanced economies are highly interdependent. Any nuclear war between advanced capitalist nations would damage capitalism generally — that is, reduce wealth — regardless of how it altered the relative balance of advantage between the combatants. In all these cases, non-combatant nations might shun nuclear armed combatants after the war, adding to the political and economic costs of causing a nuclear war.

No advanced nuclear power has any need to use its nuclear arms against a weak non-nuclear state that opposes its authority. The conventional military forces of the advanced nations are more than sufficient to overpower small, weak and poor states — and such wars of the strong against the weak occur often enough without significant opprobrium. Using nuclear weapons in such wars would cause unnecessary fright to the “world community”, and this global disapproval would unquestionably lead to a collective punitive response by economic and political measures.

In short, nuclear weapons are entirely obsolete as instruments of foreign policy by the advanced nations. The integration of world economies makes the use of nuclear weapons anywhere a net loss of power and wealth for world capitalism generally. Also, the combination of electronics, computer and space technologies has so improved the target detection and shooting accuracy of conventional military systems that large-area blasts are no longer needed; and modern conventional forces are more than adequate to exert authority over weak opponents, without the inconvenience of radioactive fallout. This is the significant news in the enthusiasm for nuclear weapons-zero by the Hoover Institute elders noted earlier.

People who are marginalized and exploited by world capitalism, and who despair over improving the lot of their communities, can see acquiring nuclear weapons as a useful means to revolution, for the exact same reasons the Hoover Institute elders see them as such a threat to the American Empire: sub-state insurgents — “terrorists” — with nuclear weapons could poke painful, bloody holes through the fabric of world capitalism, and exponentially enhance their own political power. Because this threat is so serious, and nuclear weapons are now obsolete for imperial control, the Hoover Institute elders urge a rapid convergence to nuclear weapons-zero.

To underscore the credibility of the threat (or, opportunity, depending on viewpoint), let me cite one observation. A recent study I read on the probability of smuggling nuclear material and components for a crude radioactive explosive device (or anything) across the coastline into the United States concluded that there was only a 4 percent chance the Coast Guard would intercept any single shipment when carried by small craft (a boat). To minimize the loss from any single “pinch”, the smugglers might plan to convey the consignment over several shipments. The odds of success for radioactive rum running are high. What has prevented the introduction of a terrorist nuclear device into the U.S. is the control over the radioactive source material here and abroad, not the security of the coastlines and land borders.

Taking nuclear weapons systems out of active deployment; removing nuclear warheads from missile bodies and munitions depots; disassembling warheads to store the nuclear material (e.g., uranium, plutonium) at remote high-security sites, destroying the warhead shell; and breaking fissile bomb parts into granular material for mixing into lower grade nuclear fuel, which would be “burned” in civilian nuclear power reactors to recover some of the costs sunk into the original weapons, is how nuclear weapons would physically be taken toward zero. Yes, there will still be the usual problem of reactor waste, but this has to be seen as a reasonable alternative to having finished warheads and even machined bomb parts of highly refined plutonium in circulation around the world. Reactor waste may be radioactive, thermally hot and toxic, but it cannot be compressed to criticality to produce nuclear yield — no bomb.

So much for the realities, now for the psychology of nuclear weapons-zero’s elite evangelists. Scanning the names of people endorsing the Hoover Institute elders’ nuclear weapons-zero stance, I was struck by the many former government (or, military-industrial-congressional complex) officials I recall being on active duty before and during my career in one of the US nuclear weapons labs. Two of these individuals are former high-ranking nuclear weapons lab managers (Ray Juzaitis, whose career climb to a lab directorship was rumored to have collapsed before whispers of “is he safe?” by rival upper level back-stabbers, because Juzaitis had been the manager over Wen Ho Lee in 1999,³; and Siegfried Hecker, director of the Los Alamos lab from 1986 to 1997, who was replaced after a series of safety and security lapses,⁴⁵

While these former movers and shakers now enjoy lucrative sinecures, they can hardly find these activities sufficient, because they all have big egos and aggressive career drives. How else would they have risen as far as they did? Can they really be satisfied teaching BS courses on “policy” to spoiled, young patricians being trained for the imperial bureaucracy? Can they really retain their enthusiasm attending another droning symposium on knotty and speculative analyses of imperial fortunes? Can they really look forward to displaying themselves at another reception for the rich dull “donors”, who want same face-time and flesh-press value for their impressive tax-deductable foundation donation, along with a trophy snapshot alongside the honored has-been? What these elite retirees really want is to be players again, authoring (usually plagiarizing) the compelling policy ideas of the day, directing the key actions that set the karmic wheels of nations a-spinning, focusing the attention of their peers and the wider public onto their renewed glory. It chafes to “sit on the bench”, to be “passed over”; and it stings to watch the next generation — the Obama generation — briskly undo or recycle, as suits them, the elders’ political legacies without acknowledgment. It is hard to accept that one is “finished”. So, one finds a cause, something big, something that has the potential of erasing the often distasteful memory of an elder’s past exploits, by bathing them in a new and holy aura they hope will elevate their pedestals in the necropolis of the nation’s history. Other well-known examples of this psychology are: Jimmy Carter and Palestine, and Al Gore and climate change.

Like many former “spear carriers for empire” (to use Chalmers Johnson’s phrase) I, too, might be a minor example of the psychology of post-career redemption. This prompts me keep an open mind and allow for the possibility that some of the former military-industrial-congressional complex leaders now committed to nuclear weapons-zero might really have matured to a new more humane identification with the rest of humanity. This is always something to welcome. Our lives, after all, can only be fashioned in the present; our past is set and our future is out of reach. We can express a new character or a new understanding of the world from any present moment. Reforming, becoming a “better person”, “changing our ways” can be initiated at any instant, once we acquire the conception to do so. There may be some admixture of genuine feelings for peace and compassion in the participation of former government leaders who champion the elimination of nuclear weapons. Having extended this olive branch, let me confess that I do not believe this factor is significant among the retired military-industrial-congressional elite. So much for the psychology of the new nuclear weapons-zero evangelists.

The humanist “ban the bomb” sentiment is intrinsically anti-imperial and was summed up in the Russell-Einstein manifesto as: “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” Nuclear weapons would be eliminated by meeting human needs globally — sharing (organized as an equitable U.N.) — so strong and wealthy nations would refrain from using their power to exploit the weak; and poor, disadvantaged and under-developed populations would not seek nuclear weapons, nor resort to “terror” tactics, because they would have effective and non-violent avenues to advance their societies. The new Hoover Institute-incubated nuclear weapons-zero evangelism is a pragmatic formulation aimed at preserving the American Empire by reducing one potential threat against it, which could be formed by combining the unrelieved resentments of the “service” and “waste” populations of world capitalism, and the terror potential of nuclear weapons and nuclear material.

Previously, the American situation was seen as a choice between: the absence of empire and nuclear weapons versus empire with nuclear weapons. Obviously, the first choice was forbidden. The new view states the alternatives as: empire with nuclear weapons versus empire without nuclear weapons. Note that absence of empire is not accepted as an option. The positive aspect here is that empire and capitalism without nuclear weapons, though far from our ideal, is still better than what we have today. If the Hoover Institute nuclear weapons-zero evangelism goes beyond the post-career narcissism of its clergy and actually accelerates nuclear disarmament, then it will have some value.

1. full text of January 4, 2007 op-ed.
2. WSJ op-ed, full text of January 15, 2008.
3. NYT on WHL in 2001.
4. Hecker’s 1997 testimony to congress:
   “Although the [Los Alamos] Laboratory’s long-term record for safety is impressive, in the last two years we have experienced a series of serious accidents, seemingly unrelated but suggesting weakness in the systems and structures that provide a safe working environment. On December 20, 1994, an employee of our contractor security force was killed during a training exercise when live ammunition was accidentally loaded into a weapon. On November 22, 1995, an employee lost control of a forklift and was severely injured when it rolled over. He subsequently recovered. On January 17, 1996, a contractor laborer received a severe shock when he jackhammered into a 13.5-kilovolt power line during an excavation project. He remains in a coma. On July 11, 1996, a graduate student working on energized, high-voltage equipment received a severe shock. He has recovered. As a result of these accidents, we have been subjected to intense scrutiny by DOE and the University of California.”
5. NYT on Hecker/WHL:
   ‘Mr. Hecker was cited for failing to follow through on ”an express request by senior management to develop a plan for limiting the suspect’s access, for failing to inform department’s management that the plan had failed, and for failing to take alternative actions,” according to a statement by Mr. Richardson. Though he did not name Mr. Hecker, other officials said his reference was to Mr. Hecker.’

   and

   SF Chronicle on Hecker/WHL.

My negative expectations were confirmed with the news that Obama has ruled out any prosecution of Bush Administration officials for violations of federal and international laws, that is to say for war crimes. This is a matter of policy, which extends far beyond government, and can be called “management insurance.”

Managers insure each other of immunity from responsibility, and safeguard their futures to act with impunity, by never acting in any way to bring another manager to accounts for violations committed against their employees and the general population. A manager only contributes to the prosecution of another manager when it is a matter of personal career survival, or revenge promising career advancement. (For you lawyer-types, I mean “prosecute” in the general sense of both legal and administrative proceedings, and “violations” as both statutory and policy violations).

A particularly egregious example of management insurance is described in a riveting article in the Nation magazine by Nick Turse, A My Lai A Month. Turse describes the case of Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, commander of the US Army’s Ninth Infantry Division in Vietnam (from February 1968 to April 1969) and his deputy, Col. Ira “Jim” Hunt, who served as a brigade commander and as Ewell’s chief of staff. These officers implemented Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta, whose purpose was

to pacify huge swaths of the Delta and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive…claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.

This was equivalent to a My Lai massacre a month for over a year.

Ewell and Hunt were obsessive about achieving high “body counts,” and directed their troops to essentially kill any living being, human or animal, that could be detected; and every such kill, including babies and water buffalos, was logged as a “Vietcong”. These officers saw high body counts as their avenue to promotions. The sheer horror of this policy and its careerist motivation was noted and even opposed by others in the Army, but none of these critics went outside of their management structure with their concerns, as a matter of career survival.

The results:

– The Army quashed its own investigation, burying the story from public and even Congressional view;

– a 1970 Newsweek magazine exposé was gutted to insignificance: “Buckley and Shimkin’s nearly 5,000-word investigation, including a compelling sidebar of eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese survivors, was nixed by Newsweek’s top editors, who expressed concern that such a piece would constitute a ‘gratuitous’ attack on the Nixon administration”; and

– “Ewell retired from the Army in 1973 as a lieutenant general…Ira Hunt retired from active duty in 1978 as a major general…Army records indicate that no Ninth Infantry Division troops, let alone commanders, were ever court-martialed for killing civilians during the operation.”

Pretty nice insurance for mere army generals; and some of you actually believed a new US president would support war crimes trials of a previous US president and his cabinet?! War crimes tribunals are always victor’s justice, they are imposed by the superior force of a successful invader or a successful revolution. It requires a “hostile takeover” to dump the previous management. US elections are not hostile takeovers.

Why was My Lai exposed and some limited justice dispensed? Because Ron Ridenhour (1946-1998), a soldier on active duty in Vietnam, heard about the massacre and gathered eyewitness information, and on returning to the United States sent thirty letters detailing his investigation to members of Congress and to Pentagon officials. This drew Seymour Hersh to investigate. Ridenhour had ensured the My Lai story was public, his great contribution. Operation Speedy Express had no Ron Ridenhour.

Needless to say, Ridenhour did not have a long Army career, nor achieve high rank nor gain a rich pension. But, was not his national service of far greater value? Yes, but he had punctured rather than maintained the US military’s and the Nixon Administration’s management insurance. Such maintenance is what high pay is awarded for.

You may think management insurance is corruption, and ask “why is our political class corrupt?” Why aren’t people like Ridenhour the rule rather than the exception? I think George Carlin gave the clearest (and most unsparing) answer, in 1996:

If you have selfish ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish ignorant leaders…Maybe it’s not the politicians who suck, maybe something else sucks around here, like the public…There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: The public sucks, fuck hope.

Carlin was a comic genius, but let me state his conclusion in a different way.

In 1846 a wagon train of emigrants from the Eastern U.S., the Donner Party, traveled to California but became trapped high in the Sierra Nevada mountains by deep snows (22 ft, 6.7 m) for four months, and suffered heavy losses due to starvation despite resorting to cannibalism. The members of the Donner Party were “pioneers”, “rugged individuals” intent to make their fortunes, whose only social tie was family, and for whom American Indians were obstacles (shooting Indians was not murder), and nature was for exploitation. The sad accounts of their family feuds, bickering, abandonments, thefts and murders could be taken as extreme examples of similar behaviors, and certainly similar anti-socialist attitudes we might witness among Americans in coming years as we descend deeper and deeper in the possible (probable?, inevitable?) economic depression awaiting us.

I just don’t see Americans pulling together indiscriminately during a real crisis of survival. Again, maybe I’m off, but I think our basic problem is a profound lack of character, which our political class honestly reflects; rather than that we are generally a virtuous population betrayed by a corrupt political class. It’s not “them”, it’s “us.”

The “people are good” viewpoint is orthodox leftism, as I was scolded once by an orthodox leftist who said the “people are bad” bias was a fascist tendency (the hint was clear). Obviously, from the point of view of organizing (e.g., a union) it is much easier to sell the idea and also be motivated by it, if your bias is that most people are “good”. My attitude reflects what I’ve learned from Buddhism, which is that most people are “unenlightened”, simply ignorant. Buddhism counsels compassion. It is the insistence on staying ignorant that I lose all patience with.

So, yes, it is maddening that Bush et al. will never get impeached (there is still time), tried by the Senate, or prosecuted for war crimes by the Obama Administration, or before any international tribunal. But, is this primarily a failure of Obama’s, or ours? Who elects these criminals and allows them to smirk their way through years of carnage and to reap very rich rewards? Who pays their management insurance policy? We have no innocence, and our stubborn ignorance is a worthless substitute for it. The rot comes straight out of us. Gandhi had a compassionate way of phrasing this: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The leftist hope, and one I share illogically, is that it is physically possible for most people to become that desirable change — and call it what it is, socialism. Amazingly, it only requires a change of mind.