Savage destroyers

The recent tsunami will, once all the figures are totted up, the gory, voyeuristic videos displayed on the 6 o'clock news and the press salivation over the oh-so-heartbreaking human interest stories (that are reported today, forgotten tomorrow, like newsmeat, chewed up and spout out -- how is life in Beslan today? How are the people of Iran coping with their post-earthquake reconstruction?), have killed a couple of hundred thousand people.

This can quickly be put into perspective by realising that a single warhead from one of the UK's submarine-based Trident nuclear weapons would kill a quarter of a million people (conservative estimate), if deployed against a major city. Each missile has up to six warheads. Deployed in a ring (which was our plan if we attacked Moscow), these would effectively level any city centre.

Imagine it. One of these warheads at Centrepoint would level Oxford Street. Not just damage it. Make it effectively cease to exist. It would destroy Theatreland, leaving a crater and a lot of rubble. It would severely damage the City of London.

One dropped on Broadway would effectively destroy Manhattan. Not just a couple of towers. Everything for a couple of kilometres round.

The awesome devastation of an earthquake and consequent tsunamis is something to behold but these are one-offs, irregular occurrences that, while they pose something of a threat to some of us, most of us can safely ignore.

Other potentially catastrophic threats, such as climate change, are also ignored, although perhaps not so reasonably.

But the threat of WMDs is real and the devastation they threaten enormous. We are not in this instance talking about a few cases of anthrax or even the gassing of a city. We are discussing the wholesale murder of civilians. In case of their use, it would be wholly impossible to suggest that there was no intention to kill civilians, because these "citybusting" weapons exist for the purpose of killing them.

It is right that we should work to keep these weapons out of the hands of the irresponsible.

We learned this year that the USA is so committed to that effort that it is spending
12 times as much on improving its capacity as on preventing proliferation.

The USA remains the only nation to have attacked a city with nuclear weapons. The USA's nuclear posture calls for it to retain the capacity to use nuclear weapons.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:53 am