Nuke Irony
By Farooque Chowdhury
07 May, 2010
Countercurrents.org
The nuke-powers and the would-be-nuke-powers searched ways for nabbing would-be-nuke-arms-thieves. As if a naughty rat is disturbing a mighty lion. Was the lion sleeping? Or, was the rat the lion’s friend? Who the villain and who the hero are in this tragicomedy?
States, and as a whole the present world system, now being haunted by the specter of forces it patronized, thus showed inner-weakness, limitations in handling contradictions, the contradictions generated by self-actions, and the contradictions within itself. This contradiction is not with the forces aiming change in the property relationship the states safeguard. The forces aiming change in property relationship do not aim at stealing nuke arms as science teaches them that terror is not a social force, terror does not bring in socioeconomic changes, it not even facilitates or accelerates or heralds the changes, and social forces, not terror, are capable to make changes in property relationship.
The US sponsored nuclear security summit was also part of geopolitics of the metropolis of the present world system.
The conference, offered few specifics other than the US, Canada and Mexico agreed to work together to convert the fuel in Mexico's research reactor from highly enriched uranium to a lower-enriched fuel that would be much harder to use in the manufacturing of a nuclear weapon. Mexico further agreed to get rid of all its highly enriched uranium (HEU) once the fuel is converted. Ukraine announced that it would ship all its HEU to protected storage either to Russia or the US by 2012. Canada announced plans to ship spent nuclear fuel to the US for safe keeping. Chile recently shipped about 40 pounds of enriched uranium to the US. A White House spokesperson said that the American people would “feel far more secure knowing that that material is under safe lock and key and guarded in this country…” In India, the invading British army, as Marx commented, degraded itself to police after completing the conquest. Now, the superpower has turned the keeper of nuclear safe.
The summit addressed the problem that Obama framed as a “‘cruel irony of history’ — nuclear dangers on the rise, even after the end of the Cold War and decades of fear stoked by a US-Soviet arms race”. “The single biggest threat to US security … would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said. Nuclear weapons smuggling is a more than 60-years old issue in the Cold War context. Now, the non-state-actors are creating possibility of nuclear blackmailing! So, the conference was an attempt to halt the theft, etc. of nuclear bomb ingredients – “nuclear terrorism”, as Hillary Clinton told ABC television. “We don't believe the threat from nuclear terrorism comes from states. Our biggest concern is that terrorists will get nuclear material. The threat of nuclear war ... has diminished. The threat of nuclear terrorism has increased,” she said.
It seems an evolution of possible-nuclear-mushroom-cloud. Non-state-actors now threaten the all powerful imperialism, their past-patron, in terms of nuclear arms. The relationship, it seems, has evolved: persons armed to bleed a foe – the former Soviet Union – and to counter the forces for progressive change have now turned against former friend. The world has not forgotten the CIA-supplied shoulder held anti-aircraft missiles aiming Soviet helicopter gunships on the Afghan sky and a photograph – dangling dead body of a vanquished regime’s leader swaying with wind for days from a pole in a Kabul crossroad who was hanged but was assured international protection – one of the many epitaphs imperialist civility has erected in countries conquered. Now, those operatives are threatening the sole superpower. Does it echo Mao’s assertion made in 1946 during discussions with the American journalist Ms. Strong, and in 1958: Imperialism is paper-tiger? Mao had a different logic behind the assertion. The non-state-actors with shadowy state backing, it seems, are following the dictum of their class enemy, Mao, and are in duel with their former master. It is not evolution, despite the appearance, but a manifestation of the path - vi et armis, by force of arms - imperialism has embarked on, and it tells: incedis per ignis suppositos cineri doloso, you walk on fires covered with treacherous ash (Horace, Odes).
It shows: (1) the imperialist apparatus and geopolitics are not capable to control its operatives in all cases; and (2) the establishment that nourished such forces is void of theoretical capacity to foresee implications of such tactics to face a foe, either a state or social forces. Any of the two or the both is evidence of limitations and degeneration in the establishment, in its components that include that part of academia that helped formulate the theory of employing such forces.
No actor can escape the forces of political-economy in this world theater. Not only canon-fodders, but canons also come to life with the play of political-economy. Historical perspective does not get lost with any of the actors. The non-state-actors being told as threatening with nuke arms confirm these axioms and show the imperialist world order’s limitations. It has created its own enemy that now, as is being told, threatens it, and in this threatening adventure public, innocent numerous, is targeted that can be spent. This is the appeared evolution in relationship, relationship between former friends, between public and the warring parties, between owners of nuke arms. These thus testify the nuke irony of the 21st century.
[Farooque Chowdhury, a freelancer from Dhaka, contributes on socio-economic and geopolitical issues. He edited the book Micro Credit, myth manufactured. The Age of Crisis is his latest book.]
