The age of the suitcase nuke

During the decade that “greedy capitalists” were inventing the briefcase computer (laptop, notebook, or portable computer), government people were developing the suitcase nuclear bomb.

These contrasting products elegantly illustrate the qualitative difference between market and government, private sector and “public”, voluntary exchanges and compulsory. The laptop, now at a price that almost anyone can afford and with power that would have cost one million dollars even when I joined the computer industry, brings untold benefit to mankind; fun, yes, but far more than fun. It brings the ability to perform complex designs and calculations on the go, to slash the time needed to make good business decisions and therefore directly to enhance the world’s living standards by enabling more to get done, sooner. In the last five years especially, pretty well all economic forecasters have been astonished at America’s boom. Even politicians have reaped benefit; they can promise to balance their budget and even expect that to happen, because they badly underestimated the tax revenue they’ll receive (alas) from burgeoning profits.

That is some of the payout from the computer, and in part from the laptop variety. Now look at the doleful products of government activity during the same period: An ever more costly health system has followed its increasing intervention; a huge ocean of pure waste lies in the “defence” budget, ready to fight enemies that either do not exist or certainly need not exist; a monstrously intrusive “war on drugs” that has in ninety years utterly failed to reduce drug usage but has created wave upon wave of real, violent crime and savagely reduced the personal freedoms of all of us. And so on, ad nauseam.

And in particular here, to the suitcase nuke.

On the seventh of September, CBS’ “60 Minutes” took us to Russia, and to General Letved, who is their National Security chief and a rival of Boris Yeltsin. He said that the former Soviet Union produced about two hundred nuclear bombs that look just like suitcases. Easy for one man to carry, these nasty products of government imagination pack a punch equivalent to one thousand tons of TNT, or about five hundred times more than the largest conventional bomb used in the Second World War, plus massive radiation.

He estimated that if just one were exploded by a terrorist in a crowded city, up to one hundred thousand humans would die. And there was worse to come: The location of about half of those two hundred bombs was unknown. Letved had searched high and low, and said he had failed to find them. They might be in Armenia, they might be in Latvia, they might be anywhere. They might have been sold to Iraq . . .

CBS was cautious. Letved might after all have an agenda, to embarrass Yeltsin so as to raise his chances of taking his job; so he might be telling fibs. But since the Russian Army is not paying its men, the men are having to trade with stolen weapons, and a suitcase nuke would fetch an excellent price in Baghdad. CBS took us to Washington for comment; nobody denied the possible danger. Nobody said these devices do not exist. And CBS’ Steve Kroft did not even ask anyone in “our” government whether the United States, too, has a stockpile of suitcase nukes.

But as the true history of the “Arms Race” becomes clearer, it is evident that there never was a time when the Soviets were ahead, technologically. So the safe bet is that if they produced a couple of hundred suitcase nukes, the Department of Defence produced at least that many, and sooner and more deadly. Welcome to reality, folks: Your tax dollars have been working hard, ready to destroy human lives.

What to do

If the CBS report was even half correct, some very urgent action is needed and unless he feels the heat from you and me it’s quite unlikely your average Pol will have the good sense to take it.

We must first note that no acceptable defence exists. One might visualise thousands of armed checkpoints on every road entering every city, such that all suitcases and large boxes be examined by government goons before the carrier was allowed to pass. Well, we do not need to imagine this, it has been tried, in Belfast, and it does not work. I have no figures on how many IRA bombs were detected by the British Army checkpoints, but for sure in the last couple of decades, several did get through despite them. Meanwhile, as the b–sticker says, just ONE nuclear bomb can quite ruin your day.

To make checkpoints absolutely proof against penetration even by a carrier willing to perish is completely impossible. Not only would it totally disrupt the normal productive life of the vast majority of travellers who were innocent, it would not defeat the suicide bomber because, upon detection, he would have merely to flick the trigger to accomplish his benighted objective.

So, there is no defence; how about that other favourite of conventional thinking: Deterrence? That splendidly named strategy, Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD? Also impossible. There would not be enough radioactive fragments to piece together evidence of which foreign government, if any, was responsible for sending the suitcase. So whom does one destroy, in retribution?

One policy alone will work, and that is, to remove all possible motivation for such revenge. Today that motivation often takes the form of passionate hatred of the United States by strict Muslims who feel (with excellent reason) that their religion has been savaged by successive waves of American foreign policy designed to assist their enemies. I’m not saying their hands are clean; the invasion of Kuwait was disgraceful, for one example. But I am saying it was no business of the United States Government. Nor is Israel. Nor is any other foreign country.

That policy, best called “non–interventionism” is not new, though it is for sure radically different from anything seen in living memory. It was practised and recommended by those who founded this country. Jefferson defined it as “peace, commerce, and friendship with all people, entangling alliances with none”. If you were to demand of your congressman that that firm policy be re–established immediately, we may just survive the age of the suitcase nuke.