Doomsday!

Commenting on “doomsday” scenarios such as illustrated in the 1950s film On the Beach, in a discussion on a science fiction mailing list, several people argued that human extinction instigated by thermonuclear warfare, caused directly by either a "nuclear winter" (a result of kicked-up dust blocking sunlight for extensive periods) or ionizing radiation from fallout, is just not in the cards.  The thread went this way:

My point (and I'm not altogether certain I made it well) was that we don't possess the kind of power that's required to do much more than affect things locally or in the very short term — even with our entire nuclear arsenal.
<snip>
Apparently, someone has calculated the amount of radiation needed to kill off the human population and compared that to the amount of nuclear weaponry we have.  This supports (but does not prove) my supposition.

I disagree.  It does not support your supposition, because it is unrelated.

Actually, it's not unrelated at all.  [His] original point was that there isn't enough “horsepower” as he puts it, using ANY weapons effect mechanism, to sterilize the earth.  He may have said this in a thread about nuclear winter, but he did not limit his comments to that mechanism.
 

There are at least three modalities of human extinction that should be considered here (more, if say extraterrestrial sources such as asteroidal impacts are to be included) — only a couple of variants of one of which have been discussed so far:

1. a.  Extinction due to a “nuclear winter,” instigated by dust thrown up by a thermonuclear exchange based on present nuclear arsenals, or those which existed during the cold war.

1. b.  Extinction due to radiation spread around the world by fallout, due to a thermonuclear exchange based on present nuclear arsenals, or those which existed during the cold war.

2.  Extinction due to a thermonuclear exchange based on nuclear arsenals contemplated around the time of On the Beach.

3.  Extinction resulting from the triggering of a “Doomsday Machine” a la Dr. Strangelove.

I agree with commenters that 1a & b above are unlikely to result in anything like human, much less biosphere, extinction.  As an aside, however, the effects on the protagonists themselves of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons going off in essentially all population centers in the land would still be extreme.  I heard once (I've lost the reference, sorry) that those tens of thousands of weapons were directed so broadly that at least one nuclear bomb was targeted on a vacant lot that might have been used as an airfield in an emergency.  It's hard to survive that, unless you're far from any, even the very smallest, populated centers.  That's still not extinction for the human race, however.

Physicist Freeman Dyson discussed the nuclear arsenals contemplated during the late 40s and 50s in his thought-provoking book Weapons and Hope: ¹

The nightmare, which caused Conant and Oppenheimer to oppose the hydrogen bomb so passionately, was an arms race driven by the forces of economics and deliverability toward monstrously large bombs.  They expected that each bomb would require a large investment of scarce and expensive tritium to ignite it, so that no country could afford many such bombs.  Economics would then dictate that each bomb be fueled with a huge quantity of cheap deuterium to justify the initial investment.  The bombs would then become so large that they could barely be carried in airplanes; Oppenheimer remarked in a letter to Conant shortly before the 1949 committee meeting:  “I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by oxcart.”  The problem of deliverability would then dictate that the bombs be installed in submarines or surface ships and detonated offshore, devastating great areas of country with tidal waves and radioactive fallout.  But then the installation of shore defenses would force the bomb designers to move the point of detonation farther out to sea, and the bombs would have to be made still larger to do the same damage from a greater distance.  The vicious cycle of the arms race would then continue, bombs growing less deliverable as they became bigger, and growing bigger as they became less deliverable.  The only end to such an arms race would be bombs the size of submarines, each having a yield of many thousands of megatons.  The cheapness of deuterium makes the construction of such bombs technically and economically feasible.  They were called “gigaton mines” by the people who worried about them in the 1950s.  A gigaton is the technical term for a thousand megatons.  The construction of gigaton mines would indeed be, in Conant's words, “a threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable.”

This nightmare produced a literary response which has continued to reverberate ever since.  In 1957, only two years before his death, the novelist Nevil Shute Norway published On the Beach, a description of mankind wiped out by radiological warfare.  […]

The myth of On the Beach, like Jonathan Schell's myth, is technically flawed in many ways.  Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time; people could protect themselves from the radioactivity by sheltering under a few feet of dirt; and the war is supposed to happen in 1961, too soon for even the most malevolent country to have acquired the megatonnage needed to give a lethal dose of radiation to the entire earth.  Nevertheless, the myth did what Norway intended it to do.  On the fundamental human level, in spite of all the technical inaccuracies, it spoke truth.  It told the world, in language that everyone could understand, that nuclear war means death.  And the world listened.

If the hydrogen bomb had led to an arms race of the kind which Conant and Oppenheimer most feared, with undeliverable bombs growing bigger and bigger until they became gigaton mines, then the scenario of On the Beach might ultimately have come close to reality.  Gigaton mines could, one way or another, make our planet uninhabitable.  This is the truth which Norway's story brought home to mankind.  And it is a truth which we must never forget.

The last possibility (literally) to be considered is that of a “Doomsday Machine.”  Dyson went on to discuss this: ²

Gigaton mines were also in Herman Kahn's mind when he published his book On Thermonuclear War in 1960.  In that book he created a new myth, the Doomsday Machine, which was intended to be a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of deterrence.  The Doomsday Machine is a device designed to deter nuclear war with absolute certainty by making the cost of aggression infinite.  It is the final theoretical step in an arms race which begins with hydrogen bombs and runs in the direction of gigaton mines.  Let Herman Kahn describe it in his own words:

A Doomsday weapons system might be imaginatively, and entirely hypothetically, described as follows:  Assume that for, say, ten billion dollars we could build a device whose only function is to destroy all human life.  The device is protected from enemy action, perhaps by being put thousands of feet underground, and then connected to a computer which is in turn connected, by a reliable communication system, to hundreds of sensory devices all over the United States.  The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed….  […]

Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War may have been a classic, but it was not a best-seller.  His historical erudition and ironic style were not designed to appeal to a wide audience.  The public learned about Doomsday Machines through the art of Stanley Kubrick, whose film Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb presented Kahn's idea in the language of black comedy.  Here is Soviet Ambassador De Sadeski, speaking to American President Muffley:

“A Doomsday Machine, gentlemen.  That's what I said and that's what I meant.  When it is detonated it will produce enough lethal radioactive fallout so within twelve months the surface of the earth will be as dead as the moon….  There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up in the Peace Race, the Space Race and the Arms Race.  Our deterrent began to lack credibility.  Our people grumbled for more nylons and lipsticks.  Our Doomsday project cost us just a fraction of what we had been spending in just a single year.  But the deciding factor was when we learned your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday Gap.”

From what I've seen, in Dyson's book and elsewhere, a Doomsday Machine is technically not all that difficult, but would as “Ambassador De Sadeski” said, probably cost much less than the Pentagon's current strategic budget repeated year after year, decade after decade.
 

Postscript.  Since I find myself in the astonishing position of being one of Freeman Dyson's publishers (and for my favorite work of his!), I shared the above exchange with him.  Freeman graciously sent back a response, to wit: ³

I am delighted that somebody still reads Weapons and Hope, although history has made a lot of it obsolete.  The main thing that has changed since the book was written, and is relevant to your discussion, is the retirement of all the multimegaton weapons.  Both in the USA and in Russia, the military people understand that half a megaton is big enough for any conceivable military purpose.  So there are no longer any weapons bigger than that in the stockpiles.  The irony of this situation is that the stockpiles today are almost exactly the same as they would have been if the hydrogen bomb had never been invented.  It is easy to make a pure fission bomb with a yield of half a megaton.  So the whole fight of Oppenheimer and his friends against the hydrogen bomb was in the end unimportant.  If they had won it would have made very little difference.
 

P.P.S.  After getting the above kind note from Freeman, I forwarded the following back to him, which I believe with conviction:

With regard to your book Weapons and Hope.  History may have left it behind — but the book, in turn, helped to create that history.  It's fashionable nowadays to credit Ronald Reagan (or Mikhail Gorbachev) for bringing about the situation whereby the cold war came, mostly peacefully, to an end.  In retrospect I've come to believe that I misjudged and underestimated Reagan (though I'm not sure how you care for being placed in the same sentence with him), but in my view your book (and you) are deserving of considerable credit.  I recall an editorial in Science strongly emphasizing its importance.  I believe the book had an impact, and thank you most effusively for it.

The vital, flickering flame that Dyson's Weapons and Hope encouraged and sustained during those blood-curdling days of the cold war (as indeed was its intent) was hope — hope that there could be a non-cataclysmic end to the terrifying nuclear standoff, which frankly makes anything nowadays seem trivial.  (Take the India-Pakistan faceoff, for example.  A handful of Hiroshima-style bombs threaten in that theater, versus in the cold war tens of thousands of precisely aimed, super-powered hydrogen bombs.  There's virtually no comparison.)

Freeman Dyson the savior of civilization?  Certainly, credit for the safe ending of the cold war must be spread widely.  I'm convinced, however, that Dyson's effect was significant and enduring, and even without actual human extinction having been at risk, many people might reflect that, to an appeciable extent, they owe a debt to Freeman Dyson for their lives.

Am I being too melodramatic here?  Perhaps.  One thing is for certain, however: now we have the opportunity to spread out to the stars, and grow the Big Trees that Dyson envisioned — on comets! ⁴
 
 

References

¹ Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, Harper & Row, New York, 1984, ISBN 0-06-039031-X (U.S. and Canada), LOC U21.2.D94 1984; pp. 32-34.

² Ibid., pp. 34-36.

³ Freeman Dyson, personal correspondence, 2003.08.14.

⁴ Freeman Dyson, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Impearls, 2002.11.12 (originally presented 1972.05.16).
 

UPDATE:  2003.09.03 22:16 UT.  See follow-up article Doomsday postponed (permalink).

UPDATE:  2003.09.04 18:30 UT:  Reader M. Simon comments that this “neglected to mention the effect of improved ICBM accuracy on bomb size.”  He's perfectly correct, that was an important factor in the decline in required megatonnage (or should we now say kilotonnage) for nuclear weapons.

UPDATE:  2003.09.10 16:52 UT.  See follow-up article Doomsday debated (permalink).

Depleted Uranium — the Science

My stimulative old friend wrote me to ask about depleted uranium, enclosing a recent article by Larry Johnson from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called “Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern.” ¹  Apparently this piece is now being bruited about among antiwar leftist circles as supposedly yet more dirt they've dug up on guess who (his initials are GWB).  Still these streams of doom articles are effective in raising doubts in the minds of many people.  My friend asked:

Do you have an opinion on if the depleted uranium stories are true, or just another exaggeration by anti-war groups?  If true, wouldn't using it near highly populated areas be an avoidable extra burden on the Iraqis?

Best I can make out, the depleted-uranium agitation by the antiwar left is more than just exaggeration, it's pretty much invented whole cloth — garbage, in other words.  You recall the naive old saying, “Where there's smoke there's fire”?  From what I've seen of propaganda mills blasting away full bore (full of lies), I'm much more taken by the comeback, attributed to John F. Kennedy, I believe:  “Where there's smoke, you'll usually find somebody running a smoke-making machine!”

Depleted uranium has two possible modes of instigating biological damage — ionizing radiation due to the fact that it's a radioactive metal, and biological toxicity due to the fact that it's a “heavy” metal.  Regarding the first of these, radioactively “depleted uranium” is basically as little radioactive as it's possible to be and still be radioactive and not inert.  This may sound like a quibble, but the half-life of uranium-238, the major radioactive component of depleted uranium (since it's been “depleted” of other uranium isotopes) is 4.5 x 10⁹ (i.e., billion) years (not "109" years as news pieces have erroneously reported).  In other words, over the entire 4.6 billion year age of the Earth, the quantity of uranium-238 on this planet has decreased by only half.  That is barely detectably radioactive at all, on the human timescale.

Even when it does decay, virtually all (> 99.99%) of uranium-238 follows the mode of alpha decay (emission of a Helium-4 nucleus), which cannot penetrate beyond a couple of inches in air and is stopped cold by sheet of paper.  Contrast with gamma rays (high energy electromagnetic radiation emitted by some radioactive decayers) which can penetrate through feet or meters of lead and are highly destructive to biological tissue.

The possibility of heavy-metal toxicity by uranium is potentially of greater scientific import.  That, though, is fundamentally no different than toxicity due to say lead, which has traditionally been used (without environmentalists' extraordinary complaints) as bullets on battlefields for centuries.

Rather than theorizing about either of these two possible toxicological modes of action, however, medical researchers have sought hard to see if any medical damage can be actually detected.  Several hundred U.S. solders were exposed to depleted uranium during Gulf War I: from shrapnel pieces left embedded in their bodies, to vaporized aerosols accidentally inhaled, to other possible means of exposure.  Because they're American, as well as the subsequent “Gulf War Syndrome” controversy following the first Gulf War, these people have been carefully studied.  Beyond that, hordes of folks who worked in the uranium industry have been closely watched medically over the years.  Plus the U.N., E.U., Britain's Royal Society, and others have repeatedly investigated the effects of depleted uranium in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia as a result of its use in the wars that NATO and the U.S. have fought there.  The results of all these studies are practically the same:  essentially no adverse medical effects, even less than what might have been expected due to uranium's heavy metal character.

Don't take my word for it.  In a recent general media article entitled “Assessing America's nuclear detritus,” after detailing (what I would consider to be only semi-reasonable) concerns many in Europe and elsewhere have about depleted-uranium munitions, Deborah Blum in the Baltimore Sun writes: ²

Should DU bullets be classified in this company [along with other admitted toxicological horrors]?  Rationally, of course, there's no comparing anti-tank munitions with the legacy of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.”  Some remnant tons of slightly radioactive metal should barely flicker on the environmental threat meter.  If the rest of the world would just be more rational, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

That kind of exasperated reasoning approaches the position of the Pentagon and, in fact, many independent scientists.  Robert L. Park of the American Physical Society is downright sarcastic on the question:  “I always figured it would be a lot better to be shot with a uranium bullet than a dum-dum — it should make a good clean hole.  Physicists don't spend much time worrying about natural uranium, and DU is even less radioactive by about 40 percent.”  […]

It [military advantages of depleted uranium] also means we can end battles quickly, surely a good thing.  If by doing that, DU bullets save lives and if the radiation is a minor issue, it's fair to ask why other people dislike them so much.  For one thing, radiation is only part of the problem.  Like other heavy metals, such as lead, depleted uranium is chemically toxic.  Absorbed by the body, heavy metals can damage kidneys, break down nerves and cause chemically induced cancers.  The Pentagon actually considers this a greater risk.  Military doctors have been watching gulf war veterans, braced for those illnesses.  But they haven't uncovered such signs of evil.

In the 12 years of testing, they've found no such poisoning, no radiation-linked cancers, no patterns of uranium-sparked disease.  U.N. studies conducted in Kosovo and Bosnia came up similarly empty on health effects.  That doesn't mean these are benign materials.  Studies in cell cultures and microorganisms show even low-level toxicity does harm at the cellular level, that even wimp radiation kills and deforms cells.  A few studies have suggested DU might be worse than passive metals such as lead, that the radiation and toxicity could work together to cause genetic damage.  Perhaps.  So far, though, only the Iraqis have noted severe effects in humans, from birth defects to cancers, but they have also refused to allow the United Nations to independently verify the claims.

Could those pre-war (Gulf War II), Saddamite Iraqis making the charge perhaps have had an ax to grind in this affair?  Just maybe?  Could the leftists who've so avidly taken up the cry also?

There have, of course, been many articles in the general media, of varying degrees of quality, on the subject of depleted uranium.  Numerous bloggers have also posted on the subject, and as with the general media, with varying degrees of quality and veracity.  I'll mention only a couple of these, two posts by Steven Den Beste on USS Clueless. ^{3, 4}

The major purpose of this article, however, is to point to (wrap ups of) the major scientific literature on the issue of depleted uranium.
 

National Defense Research Institute.  The U.S. National Defense Research Institute has done a review of the scientific literature with regard to Gulf War illnesses, of which its Volume 7 pertains to depleted uranium.  Among its conclusions, for example, I will emphasize three: ⁵

• […]  there are no peer-reviewed published reports of detectable increases of cancer or other negative health effects from radiation exposure to inhaled or ingested natural uranium at levels far exceeding those likely in the Gulf.

• Large variations in exposure to natural uranium in the normal environment have not been associated with negative health effects.

• […]  no increased morbidity or frequency of end-stage renal disease has been observed in relatively large occupational populations chronically exposed to natural uranium at concentrations above normal ambient ones.
   

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).  Nor are these conclusions limited to United States agencies.  On the contrary, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) did an investigation, in which it dispatched teams of researchers to Kosovo to inquire after the effects of depleted uranium in that conflict.  A report on the UNEP's findings, presented last year, appears in the journal Science (requires subscription or pay-per-view).  Here are pertinent quotes: ⁶

The team, led by physical chemist Pier Roberto Danesi, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA's) laboratory in Siebersdorf, Austria, confirmed that some patches of soil from known impact sites in Kosovo are tainted with DU.  But the amounts, the team maintains, are so tiny that the radioactivity poses virtually no cancer risk.  Moreover, Danesi's group found no evidence of elevated plutonium levels in the soil.  Their findings jibe with those of other bodies, including the U.K.'s Royal Society and the European Union, that have surveyed the DU literature.  “There is a consensus now that DU does not represent a health threat,” says Danesi.  The latest findings, asserts radiochemist Corrado Testa of the University of Urbino in Italy, “confirm that there is no risk from DU.”

They found that in the most contaminated places, a few milligrams of soil could contain hundreds of thousands of DU particles — but still not a high enough concentration to elevate cancer risk, Danesi says.  Plutonium levels in the Kosovo soil — about 1 becquerel per kilogram — accorded with global levels of fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests.  For comparison, soil levels in the Alps, near Salzburg, are nine times as high, thanks to Chornobyl.  ”As far as the plutonium is concerned, you could feed this soil to someone and he'd be fine,” Danesi says.  His team will elaborate on its findings in companion articles in the December [2002] issue of the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.  …  [M]aintains Testa, “for me this is a false problem.  We could be spending money on more urgent problems” — toxic solvents, heavy metals, and organic pollutants, to name a few, he says.
 

World Health Organization (WHO).  The World Health Organization has done its own reviews of the (considerable) scientific information available on the health effects of uranium, depleted or un.  Here's a selection of its results: ⁷

• In a number of studies on uranium miners, an increased risk of lung cancer was demonstrated, but this has been attributed to exposure from radon decay products.  Lung tissue damage is possible leading to a risk of lung cancer that increases with increasing radiation dose.  However, because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group.  Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer.

• Erythema (superficial inflammation of the skin) or other effects on the skin are unlikely to occur even if DU is held against the skin for long periods (weeks).

• No consistent or confirmed adverse chemical effects of uranium have been reported for the skeleton or liver.

• No reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans.
   

The European Commission.  The European Commission of the E.U. has issued its own comprehensive evaluation of the situation with regard to depleted uranium.  Here are its basic conclusions: ⁸

• […]  On the basis of available information, it is concluded that exposure to DU could not produce any detectable health effects under realistic assumptions of the doses that might be received.  Moreover, in view of the fact that committed doses from incorporated DU build up over a lifetime and in view of the minimum latency period of cancer induction, such effects could not occur during the first few years after incorporation as a result of radiological exposure.

  This conclusion applies in particular to leukaemia: while the latency period for leukaemia is shorter than for solid cancers, uranium accumulates very little in blood forming organs such as bone marrow.  Following inhalation of insoluble uranium the calculated risk of leukaemia is orders of magnitude lower than the risk of lung cancer induction.

  The possibility of a combined effect of exposure to toxic or carcinogenic chemicals and to radiation can not a priori be excluded but there is no evidence to support this hypothesis either.  Under the considered scenario, exposures to DU give low doses, comparable to the natural background.  Hence there is no reason to believe that chemicals may change the magnitude of the potential radiation effects.

• Possible contamination of drinking water must be considered since it is a possible pathway of exposure if very large amounts of DU are buried in soil […].  A generic assessment yields nothing however but very low doses resulting from drinking water.  […]
   

The Royal Society.  The Royal Society of the U.K., Britain's Academy of Sciences, has done its own study, discussed here in the journal Science (requires subscription or pay-per-view). ⁹  The study “concludes that health risks from DU radiation are ‘for the most part low.’  There are possible exceptions, however, including a likely higher risk of lung cancer in tank crew members who inhale the ‘impact aerosol’ created when a DU shell pierces their vehicle's armor.”  Note that this is primarily a danger for tank crews, who are likely killed anyway directly from the penetration fireball.

The Royal Society's study can be reviewed in its entirety here.  Some of its major conclusions: ¹⁰ 

• Except in extreme circumstances any extra risks of developing fatal cancers as a result of radiation from internal exposure to DU arising from battlefield conditions are likely to be undetectable above the general risk of dying from cancer over a normal lifetime.  This remains true even if our estimates of risk resulting from likely exposures are one hundred times too low.

• The extreme circumstances will apply only to a very small fraction of the soldiers in a theatre of war, for example those who survive in a vehicle struck by a DU penetrator, or those involved in cleaning up struck vehicles.  In such circumstances, and assuming the most unfavourable conditions, the lifetime risk of death from lung cancer could be about twice that in the general population.

• Any extra risks of death from leukaemia, or other cancers, as a result of exposure to DU are estimated to be substantially lower than the risks of death from lung cancer.  Under all likely exposure scenarios the extra lifetime risks of fatal leukaemia are predicted to be too small to be detectable.  […]

• For those returning to live in areas where DU munitions were deployed, including peace-keepers, the inhalation uptakes from resuspended DU are considered to be unlikely to cause any substantial increase in lung cancer or other cancers.  The estimated lifetime risk of fatal lung cancer is about one in a million, although there could be high risks for some individuals with worst-case intakes of DU due to higher levels of local contamination.  Estimated risks of other cancers are at least 100-fold lower.  […]
   

National Institutes of Health/National Academy of Sciences.  The U.S. Institute of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in conjunction with National Academy of Sciences has produced a massive study on the “Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War,” of which its Volume 1 (a 24 megabyte file, in PDF format) exhaustively examines depleted uranium, among other things.  The NIH/NAS report arrives at similar conclusions to all the others: ¹¹ 

• The committee concludes that there is limited/suggestive evidence of no association between exposure to uranium and lung cancer at cumulative internal dose levels lower than 200 mSv or 25 cGy.  However, there is inadequate/insufficient evidence to determine whether an association does or does not exist between exposure to uranium and lung cancer at higher levels of cumulative exposure.

• The committee concludes that there is limited/suggestive evidence of no association between exposure to uranium and clinically significant renal disfunction.

• The committee concludes that there is inadequate/insufficient evidence to determine whether an association does or does not exist between exposure to uranium and the following health outcomes:  lymphatic cancer; bone cancer; nervous system disease; non-malignant respiratory disease; or other health outcomes (gastrointestinal disease, immune-mediated disease, effects on hematological parameters, reproductive or developmental dysfunction, genotoxic effects, cardiovascular effects, hepatic disease, dermal effects, ocular effects, or musculoskeletal effects).
   

Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), put it most concisely in its Public Health Statement for Uranium:  “No human cancer of any type has ever been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium.” ¹²
 

Journal Nature.  Among other recent scientific articles discussing depleted uranium, perhaps typical is this one from the British journal Nature (requires subscription or pay-per-view).  In the midst of arguing that “toxicology research should urgently appraise its performance and join mainstream biomedical science,” the authors (a Briton and Italian) express the point that “there is no evidence for radiological or chemical carcinogenic risk [from depleted uranium in, e.g., Kosovo] at any conceivable level of exposure.” ¹³
 

In these studies, depleted uranium gets off the hook from both a theoretical and a practical, what-are-the-observed-results? point of view; thus it's very difficult to take any leftist-fanned-up commotion with regard to this matter seriously.  They're just lying, I'm sorry to say.
 
 

References

¹ Larry Johnson, “Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2003.08.04.

² Deborah Blum, “Assessing America's nuclear detritus,” Baltimore Sun, 2003.06.08.

³ Steven Den Beste, “Non weapons grade,” USS Clueless, Stardate 20020929.0138.

⁴ Steven Den Beste, “More on depleted uranium,” USS Clueless, Stardate 20021224.1126.

⁵ A Review of the Scientific Literature As It Pertains to Gulf War Illnesses, Volume 7: Depleted Uranium, by Naomi H. Harley, Ernest C. Foulkes, Lee H. Hilborne, Arlene Hudson, C. Ross Anthony; RAND Report, National Defense Research Institute, 1999.

⁶ Richard Stone, “New Findings Allay Concerns Over Depleted Uranium,” Science, Vol. 297, No. 5588 (2002.09.13), p. 1801 (requires subscription or pay-per-view),

⁷ Depleted Uranium, World Health Organization, revised 2003.01.  (See Fact Sheet No. 257 linked to on that page.)

⁸ Depleted Uranium, Opinion of the Group of Experts established according to Article 31 of the European Treaty, chartered by the European Commission, report delivered 2001.03.06.

⁹ Science, Vol. 292, No. 5521 (2001.05.25), p. 1465 (requires subscription or pay-per-view).

¹⁰ Health hazards from depleted uranium munitions, The Royal Society, 2002.05.

¹¹ Gulf War and Health, Volume 1: Depleted Uranium, Sarin, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Vaccines, Edited by Carolyn E. Fulco, Catharyn T. Liverman, and Harold C. Sox, Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War, U.S. Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, 2000; pp. 14-16.

¹² Public Health Statement for Uranium, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), CAS #7440-61-1, 1999.09.

¹³ Marcello Lotti and Pierluigi Nicotera, Toxicology: A risky business, Nature, Vol. 416, p. 481 (2002.04.04); doi:10.1038/416481a (requires subscription or pay-per-view).
 
 

UPDATE:  2003.08.21 15:15 UT.  Made some formatting changes.

UPDATE:  2003.08.22 13:00 UT.  Added a paragraph (alpha emission from U-238).

UPDATE:  2003.08.27 13:00 UT.  Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy has linked to Impearls' article.  Armed Liberal at Winds of Change picked the link up from him.  Bargarz in turn noticed the link there.  (Bargarz is one of those bloggers who has posted extensively on depleted uranium before.)  Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping posted a link to the article.  Bill Herbert at COINTELPRO Tool also linked to it.  Roger Schlafly at Roger's View posted a link too.

CPO Sparkey at Sgt. Stryker's linked to the piece, with the added comment:

Back when I was in the Navy, I had a liberty buddy who worked the CWIS mounts and spent a lot of time in the magazine surrounded by all that 20 mm Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS), Depleted Uranium (DU) sub-caliber penetrator ammunition.  When we returned from our deployment he promptly went on leave flying home to the east coast (the Enterprise was home ported in Alameda CA at the time).  Like a typical sailor (or college student) he took his laundry home for Mom, only this time he forgot to turn in his personal dosemetry (TLD).  Upon his return he turned in his TLD and it was then discovered that his round trip, cross country flight, resulted in more exposure than his previous 6 months living in a room fill with several tons of Depleted Uranium.

Clayton Cramer also linked to it, commenting:

Nice Summary of the Depleted Uranium Tempest in a Teapot.  It's here, by Michael McNeil.  My only quibble might be that he mentions at one point that the radiation from depleted uranium doesn't have much penetration.  That's true.  Outside of your body, it's no big deal at all — alpha particles won't even penetrate clothing.  If it ends up inside your body, even the limited penetration has some potential to do some damage.  Overall, however, I am not surprised that there is consensus that depleted uranium is an oversold problem.  It is the left's latest attempt at creating a crisis upon which to destroy Bush for overthrowing their favorite thug.

Clayton is correct that alpha radiation occurring within a living organism is a totally different bear from alpha radiation simply impacting the skin of that organism (which typically blocks it without harm).  Recall, however, that depleted uranium's rate of alpha emission is still subject to U-238's extraordinary 4.5 billion year half-life.  Thus the proper question to ask is whether that alpha emission occurs at a rate which produces damage that is detectable — and the answer which comes back from all the studies is that it does not.  That answer is obtained, as it should be, not only from theoretical considerations but also from practical medical investigations of people and patients, including detective-like following and connecting of dots with regard to places where exposures to toxicologically questionable materials could have occurred, versus where individual people were who have been reported sick.

CPO Sparkey reminds us in his tale that cosmic rays — far more powerful than alpha particles — continually sheet through our bodies, even at sea level (though less in magnitude at lower altitudes).  Any other radiation, even if originating within one's own cells, which quantitatively constitutes only a small fraction of that constant cosmic bombardment, isn't going to produce any noticeable effects.  As the European Commission put it in their study above, “exposures to DU give low doses, comparable to the natural background.”  ⁸

Bill Clinton and the f--king of Howard Dean's 16 Questions

A friend requested that I critique/fisk Howard Dean's now-famous sixteen questions to President Bush for him, asking me, “Which, if any, of these questions do you feel are the most important?  Or do you think they are all missing the point?”

I'm afraid I regard the vast bulk of the present Democratic and leftist hoorah over intelligence leading up to the Iraq war to be, as Prof. Glenn Reynolds recently put it, “hysterical overreach” by critics of the Administration.  I thought Bill Clinton, speaking 2003.07.22 on CNN's “Larry King Live,” put a far saner slant on the situation than most Democrats (Republican ex-Senator Bob Dole also spoke on the program):

Larry King:  Do you join, President Clinton, your fellow Democrats, in complaining about the portion of the State of the Union address that dealt with nuclear weaponry in Africa?

Bill Clinton:  Well, I have a little different take on it, I think, than either side.

First of all, the White House said — Mr. Fleischer said — that on balance they probably shouldn't have put that comment in the speech.  What happened, often happens.  There was a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence.  The president said it was British intelligence that said it.  And then they said, well, maybe they shouldn't have put it in.

Let me tell you what I know.  When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for.  That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had.  We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot.  And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998.  We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it.  But we didn't know.  So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.

I mean, we're all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and biological weapons.  So there's a difference between British — British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true.  I don't know what was true, what was false.  I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, Well, we probably shouldn't have said that.  And I think we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for Iraq is now.  That's what I think.

Larry King:  So do you share that view, Senator Dole?

Bob Dole:  Oh, he's exactly right.  Let's put the focus where it belongs.

I never got to be president.  I tried a couple of times.  But President Clinton understands better than anybody that he gets piles and piles of classified, secret, top secret information, and I don't know how many, maybe the president can tell me.  I don't know how much of this goes across your desk every day.  It probably shouldn't have been in the message.  But that's history.  It's passed.  We can't change it.  And we need to focus on the real problem.

Larry King:  What do you do, Mr. President, with what's put in front of you?

Bill Clinton:  Well, here's what happens: every day the president gets a daily brief from the CIA.  And then, if it's some important issue — and believe me, you know, anything having to do with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons became much more important to everybody in the White House after September the 11 — then they probably told the president, certainly Condoleezza Rice, that this is what the British intelligence thought.  They maybe have a difference of opinion, but on balance, they decided they should leave that line in the speech.

I think the main thing I want to say to you is, people can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks…

Bob Dole:  That's right.

Bill Clinton:  … of biological and chemical weapons.  We might have destroyed them in '98.  We tried to, but we sure as heck didn't know it because we never got to go back in there.

Larry King:  Yes.

Bill Clinton:  And what I think — again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy?  How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea?

We should be pulling for America on this.  We should be pulling for the people of Iraq.  We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way.  But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence.  The president said it was British intelligence.  Then they said on balance they shouldn't have done it.  You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president.  I mean, you can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile.  The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now.  That's what I think.

(End quote.)  That's what I think too.

I'll now try to answer Dean's sixteen questions.  I should say up front in advance, however, that I find Dean's general accusatory tone (and that of so many of the other Democrats who've jumped into this affair) to be completely out of line in this situation.  Certainly there's very little evidence, from what I can see, to support that “BUSH LIED!!!!” — to use all the CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! that so many foaming-at-the-mouth propagandists are screaming to the stars.

I must admit that the present fuss reminds me of nothing so much as the aftermath of a battle nearly 2,500 years ago, during the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians, after winning a brilliant naval victory over the Spartans, executed the generals who had achieved their victory — because they were accused of failing to rescue survivors in stormy seas afterwards.  (There's an aphorism about “the perfect being the enemy of the good”….)

On to Howard Dean's “sixteen questions”:

1.  Mr. President, beyond the NSC and CIA officials who have been identified, we need to know who else at the White House was involved in the decision to include the discredited uranium evidence in your speech, and, if they knew it was false, why did they permit it to be included in the speech.

Right away there's disagreement over the premises in the question.  The material presented in Bush's State of the Union speech is not “discredited uranium evidence” because to the extent that any “uranium evidence” is “discredited,” it concerns only the African country of Niger, whereas Bush's speech referred to Hussein's attempts to procure uranium from African countries, and there's far more to Africa than just Niger.  (From what I understand there're four candidate nations in Africa from which Saddam might have sought to obtain such fissionable material.)  Beyond that, as Bill Clinton (and numerous others have) pointed out, Bush in his speech said British intelligence believed Saddam had made such an attempt — which is perfectly true.  British intelligence still believes this (which they, in turn, learned from the French).  So Dean's first question, basically, on examination entirely disappears.

2.  Mr. President, we need to know why anyone in your Administration would have contemplated using the evidence in the State of the Union after George Tenet personally intervened in October 2002, to have the same evidence removed from the President's October 7th speech.  (The Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, 7/13/2003)

Somebody screwed up?  Frankly, I don't even care about the answer to this question.  It's just too boring.  As I said before, technically there's nothing wrong with what Bush said even now.  And the idea that those 16 words were integral to the case Bush was making to the U.N. (much less the American people, as the case to them had been made, long since, the previous October) is frankly ludicrous.

3.  Mr. President, we need to know why you claimed this very week that the CIA objected to the Niger uranium sentence “subsequent” to the State of the Union address, contradicting everything else we have heard from your administration and the intelligence community on the matter.  (The Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)

Ditto, in spades.  (And to repeat myself, there is no “Niger uranium sentence” in Bush's speech.  There is, on the other hand, an “Africa uranium sentence” — which still stands today, undiscredited.)

4.  Mr. President, we urgently need an explanation about the very serious charge that senior officials in your Administration may have retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson by illegally disclosing that his wife is an undercover CIA officer.  (The Nation, Corn, David, 7/16/2003)

We're starting to get more interesting here.  I must admit I don't know much about this allegation, though I've heard that she isn't an “undercover CIA officer” at all but rather is merely a CIA employee.  (And while I respect David Corn, I don't — much — The Nation.)  I'd tend to consider this a slip-up, if indeed there's anything to it at all.  Certainly, this is not the stuff of which great scandals are made.

UPDATE:  I've learned a bit more about this particular case.  On the one hand, its potential for turning into a sizable scandal may be larger than I'd thought, but on the other, the affair seems to be so murky that even as more details come out, I still doubt it'll really go anywhere.  Here's a wrap-up with pointers to more information on the case.

5.  Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration persisted in using the intercepted aluminum tubes to show that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear program and why your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, claimed categorically that the tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” when in fact our own government experts flatly rejected such claims.  (CNN, 9/08/2002, Knight Ridder News Service, 10/04/2002)

I believe there's considerably more controversy in regard to this topic than Dean flatly states.  (One could even argue that Dean is “LYING!!!!” here — if one were inclined to be uncharitable.  Of course, nearly all of Bush's critics are uncharitable in this regard.)

It is plain that one of Saddam's WMD strategies was utilization of “dual use” technologies, which can be quickly turned almost at a moment's notice from acceptable civilian use (e.g., pesticides) to the production of deadly toxins and weapons.  The controversial aluminum tubes fit neatly into that paradigm.  Is it true in this particular case?  Maybe not — but it's almost certainly true in many other cases.

6.  Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld created a secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon that selectively identified questionable intelligence to support the case for war including the supposed link to al-Qaeda while ignoring, burying or rejecting any evidence to the contrary.  (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, 5/12/03)

Sounds positively black-helicopterish, doesn't it?  A “a secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon that selectively identified questionable intelligence....”  Oooh!  Call in the rectum scrappers!

The only problem is that intelligence services generally are (and have to be) “secret,” and it's the job of “secret intelligence units” to “selectively identify intelligence” — which is to say, separate out the wheat from the chaff.  There's always a blizzard of “intelligence” — i.e., information, good and bad — saying all manner of things, much of it contradictory, and the task of an intelligence service is to identify what's pertinent and what's not, with full knowledge that it's an imperfect art to say the least, and mistakes are always possible.

September 11, 2001 ought to have clued us that overlooking or not putting together crucial pieces of intelligence information is a pathway to disaster.  Critics of the Administration like to portray its handling of the lead-up to September 11 as too timid in this regard, a viewpoint I tend to support.  But post the Iraq war, in my view, critics can't then have it both ways and rake the Bush Administration over the coals for being too aggressive.  It's clear that aggressively putting together intelligence clues (whether conclusive in their implications or not) is absolutely imperative in this new environment where private entrepreneurs can attack us with weapons of mass destruction.

As for the supposed non-existence of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, I find it (sardonically) amusing that the left is so confident the Baathist Party and Al Qaeda are so ideologically opposed to each other that even when attacked by the greatest superpower (hyperpuissance, as the French like to say) in history, they'll hold to their ideals and go down in defeat by their hated enemy rather than deign to cooperate with each other.  Even the antiwar movement itself isn't that idealistically pure, in that they're often perfectly willing to form alliances with groups that'd like to destroy our entire civilization (references provided on request).

Here's what left-leaning (but pro-liberation) columnist Christopher Hitchens had to say recently on the subject of cooperation between Baathists and Al Qaeda:

And on the al-Qaida link, it seems to me [the press] are just not doing their job at all.  There are innumerable links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that have been demonstrated very many times.  And now every broadcast and every utterance by the Ba'ath Party is as if it was written by Osama bin Laden, and half the fighters in Iraq, half the bandits there, are imported from outside jihad forces.  This relationship did not begin yesterday.  They are, in effect, now a fusion of those who believe in the one party and those who believe in the one-God state.  But the press does a very bad job of reporting that — and I go by, let's say, The New York Times; we can't [use] “the press” too generically as David knows, but The New York Times refers to that kind of gangsterism as the “Iraqi resistance”… and it refers to the American presence in the country as the “American occupation.”  Now just tell me what you think the subliminal effect of those two terms is&hellip.  I think you and I could both agree that we know a mentality when we see one.  I would say even during the war, when I was partly in the south of Iraq and mainly in Kuwait, I could tell what the press corps thought in general when — remember that slight sag in the first few days of the campaign? — it looked as if the Rumsfeld plan wasn't quite working.  There was practically no one in the press, I'd say, that wasn't pulling for that happen.  They all wanted to be able to report a quagmire, a defeat, a disaster; either some of them for ideological reasons or some of them because it's a better story."  — Christopher Hitchens, on CNBC (July 24, 2003)

Back to Dean's questions:

7.  Mr. President, we need to know what the basis was for Secretary Rumsfeld's assertion that the US had bulletproof evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a “meaningful connection” to Al Qaeda.  (NY Times, Schmitt, Eric, 9/28/2002, NY Times, Krugman, Paul, 7/15/2003)

I for one am hardly inclined believe assertions by the New York Times, maybe even especially Paul Krugman, about what U.S. intelligence analysts “have consistently agreed” in this regard.  Indeed, I doubt very strongly that American intelligence services have reached a consensus that there was no such contact (see above).  It's sad that it's gotten to that point vis-a-vis the New York Times.

8.  Mr. President, we need to know why Vice President Cheney claimed last September to have “irrefutable evidence” that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, an assertion he repeated in March, on the eve of war.  (AP, 9/20/2002, NBC 3/16/2003)

Probably because Saddam has done so.  Notice that Cheney said Saddam had “reconstituted his nuclear weapons program” rather than that Saddam has nuclear weapons.  Many commentators are getting that wrong, implying Cheney said Hussein has nuclear weapons now.  Dean got that part right, but is still trying (as with all these questions) to make political points with it.  We know from the aftermath of Gulf War I, however, that Hussein was then only a few months away from completing his nuclear bomb.  At that time he had (and therefore still has) the exact design for such a weapon, and I'm convinced he has all the actual parts prepared for a number of such bombs (probably buried in people's gardens, like the fissionable-isotope concentrating centrifuge that an Iraqi scientist recently turned in, buried for the last dozen years in his garden), waiting only for a supply of fissionable material to be complete.

And, given the looseness of controls on fissionable materials in places like the former Soviet Union, I wouldn't be blasé about Saddam's managing to acquire such material almost at any time, even now when out of power, much less while still in control of a California-sized, oil-rich nation!  (The left's supreme ennui to, if not positively hoping for, such an occurrence I find positively frightening.)

9.  Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Powell claimed with confidence and virtual certainty in February before the UN Security Council that, “Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent.  That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.”  (UN Address, 2/05/2003)

This is no mystery, and Dean should know the answer, if he's not dissimulating (or incompetent).  The U.N. inspectors documented the existence of all the stuff themselves, before they were kicked out by Saddam in 1998 (as they effectively were kicked out, contrary to allegations by the left).  Once again, it appears Dean's trying to score political points with readers who don't know any better.

10.  Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld claimed on March 30th in reference to weapons of mass destruction, “We know where they are.  They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”  (The Guardian, Whitaker, Brian and Rory McCarthy, 5/30/2003)

I'd have to see the context before I could determine what Rumsfeld is actually saying here.  It sounds like he's saying “they're in Iraq, probably areas where Hussein is strong politically,” which should hardly be very controversial, I would think.  I'd say this isn't a very important point, in any case.

11.  Mr. President, we need an explanation of the unconfirmed report that your Administration is dishonoring the life of a soldier who died in Iraq as a result of hostile action by misclassifying his death as an accident.  (Time, Gibbs, Nancy and Mark Thompson, 7/13/2003)

An “unconfirmed” report?  “Dishonoring”?  It seems Dean is merely trying to fill out his “16 questions” here.  (And why does Howard Dean need exactly 16 questions?  Obviously because of Bush's “16 words.”  Didn't I say this was just a political ploy?)

12.  Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration has never told the truth about the costs and long-term commitment of the war, has consistently downplayed what those would be, and now continues to try to keep the projected costs hidden from the American people.

Hah!  The Administration throughout the war has said it didn't know what those costs would end up being.  Now, maybe they were to some degree trying avoid wallowing in those kind of unpleasant issues until after the war was actually over, but on the one hand, that's hardly unusual for politicians, and on the other, it's absolutely correct: they didn't know until recently how much it was going to cost.

Sorry, this too is not the stuff out of which great scandals are made.

13.  Mr. President, we need to know why you said on May 1, 2003, that the war was over, when US troops have fought and one or two have died nearly every day since then and your generals have admitted that we are fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq.  (Abizaid, Gen. John, 7/16/2003)

Bush said the major fighting was over — and it was.  A soldier's being shot down every day or so (lamentable though it is) is not major fighting.  I wonder what Dean would have thought of the aftermath of the conquest of Germany in 1945, with millions of starving displaced persons along with thousands of unreconstructed Nazis scouring the country?  Something of a “guerrilla war” went on for two years in Germany after 1945, yet most people would consider the postwar occupation (and democratization) of Germany to have been a success.

By speaking of “guerrilla war” Dean is attempting to raise the Vietnam!!! Quagmire!!! specter in people's heads.  But the situation in Iraq is hardly like Vietnam, which went on for ten years and cost 58,000 lives.  In Iraq, almost four months after the fall of Baghdad, some four dozen soldiers have been killed.  Notice the major discrepancy between those figures?  Twenty American soldiers a day over a decade died in Vietnam.  It would take a century at this rate to mount up in Iraq a Vietnam War sized death toll.

Personally, I'm convinced things will change radically in Iraq much sooner than that.  For one thing, Baathists have much less popular support in Iraq than Nazis did in postwar Germany, while the Baathists enjoy no powerful external patron backing them up like the Viet Cong had vis-a-vis North Vietnam.  Weed out the Baathist fascist holdovers, and they're gone!

Beyond that, we really have a very powerful fifth (sixth?) column operating in our favor in Iraq: all the many, many decent people who desperately wish for and will work towards their country's ceasing being a megalomaniacs' playground and international pariah state and joining the modern world.  The extraordinary sales of satellite TVs in Iraq since the war show how that message is avidly sought after.

14.  Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration had no plan to build the peace in post-war Iraq and seems to be resisting calls to include NATO, the United Nations and our allies in the stabilization and reconstruction effort.

Dean says the Administration had “no plan to build the peace in post-war Iraq”?  That's frankly nonsense.  The Administration's initial plans for the aftermath of the war perhaps (partially) didn't work out, so now they're upgrading and changing the plan.  Ever hear the saying, “the most brilliant battlefield plan never survives contact with the enemy”?  It's necessary to be able to improvise, and I believe the Administration is doing that in Iraq.  Kudos to them.

As for “resisting calls to include NATO, the United Nations and our allies in the stabilization and reconstruction effort,” this is pure spin.  What the Administration is resisting, and rightly so, in my opinion, are calls to go crawling back to the United Nations, begging them to deign to take over the entire postwar reconstruction and development effort.  Not only would the U.S. basically have to suck up to the U.N. and people like the French, admitting it was in the wrong going into Iraq (which I believe it emphatically was not), but the U.N. would want and require control of the entire effort.

I don't buy the assertion commonly heard that the United Nations is the world's best handler of the reconstruction of failed states; in my view, its record is poor at best.  Especially since the U.N. seems to have a strong predilection towards statism and socialism, against democracy along with capitalist economic development, I think they'd be a terrible choice for building the future democratic, capitalistic Iraq that is vital if the Middle East is to be reformed and ultimately join the modern world (in other words, so that we can "win" the war on terror).  No, I think a better model than the U.N.'s efforts in places like Bosnia and the Congo is the reconstruction of Germany and Japan undertaken by the United States at the end of World War II.  Thus, I believe the best choice for us is to, yes, let the U.N., NATO, and other redevelopment agencies into Iraq — but on our terms.

15.  Mr. President, we need to know what you were referring to in Poland on May 30, 2003, when you said, “For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong.  We found them.”  (The Washington Post, Mike Allen, 5/31/2003)

Dean appears to be being deliberately dense if not deceptive (LYING!!!?) here, as the news article he refers to says explicitly what Bush is talking about: the mobile biological laboratory trailers found a couple months back.  And I must say, from what I can tell, they certainly do seem to fit the bill!

16.  Mr. President, we need to know why you incorrectly claimed this very week that the war began because Iraq would not admit UN inspectors, when in fact Iraq had admitted the inspectors and you opposed extending their work.  (The Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)

Assuming that the brief quote from Bush wasn't taken completely out of context, it may be that he partially misspoke himself here (misspeaking is not unknown for him, after all!).  It's inappropriate, however, in my view for the President to be interrogated in a kind of a Star Chamber by people of the supercilious ilk of Howard Dean whenever he does so, and beyond that, there is a very real sense in which what Bush said is perfectly true.

Although the U.N. weapons inspectors were allowed to enter physically enter Iraq, Saddam and his government did not provide the kind of pro-active, positive cooperation that United Nations Resolution 1441 (passed unanimously by the U.N. Security Council) explicitly in no uncertain terms demanded.  Resolution 1441 made clear that Saddam was not merely to open doors for the inspectors and let them inspect whatever they wanted, he had to provide them with all the information up front: tell them where to go and what to do to find the banned weapons, not keep mum and hope they can't figure it out.  Hussein manifestly did not provide the active cooperation required, and lacking it, the kind of you-hide-it and I'll-try-to-find-it game (played out so much in the past between Saddam and the inspectors) is exactly what Bush very forthrightly refused to get into this time — and that game is precisely what Dean is approvingly aiming at when criticizes Bush for “opposing extending their [the inspectors'] work.”  Bravo for Bush, I say!  (Who says who is stupid?)
 

My old friend had a couple of closing questions.  “You mentioned a site where questions are being suggested that you think are more important.  Do you remember the address?”

Try this piece, by the inimitable Glenn Reynolds.

Finally, my friend asked:  “Also, do you feel any Dem will be able to unseat Bush?”

Theoretically, yes.  Practically, though, the Democrats' problem, as I see it, is complicated by the fact that the Democratic (mostly leftist) base appears to be rushing, pell-mell, into a strongly antiwar, position of extreme (I would say vitriolic) criticism of Bush — during time of an important war.  Moreover, this war, the War on Terror, was forced on us, not voluntarily entered into, as a result of the savage murder of 3,000 Americans on 2001.09.11.  Thus, the nearest historical counterpart to the current Democratic and leftist barrage of criticism of Bush is to be found, I believe, in the Republican Isolationists' hatred for and attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II — another war vital for preservation of the future of Western liberal-democratic civilization against a murderous fascist cultural malignancy.  I think it's safe to say at this historical remove (Pat Buchanan's macabre viewpoint not withstanding) that the Isolationists' opposition to the Second World War was very much mistaken, and not a model to be emulated in such a circumstance.

As a result of the Democrats' growing antiwar fixation, I'd say probably only an antiwar candidate (and not someone like Joe Lieberman) will be able to win the 2004 Democratic primaries to become the Demo. candidate.  Unfortunately for the Democrats — but fortunately, I'd say, for the nation — I think a large majority of Americans won't be able to accept such a candidate in the general election.  Thus, as a centrist Democrat, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, put it the other day, the Democratic Party appears that to be in the process of committing “assisted suicide” (the Republicans are quite willing to do the “assist” part) with regard to the upcoming election.

I'll close by reiterating that I've never voted for Bush; I opposed him vigorously in the 2000 election, and was appalled by the aftermath in Florida and the Supreme Court.  Nonetheless, Bush certainly is President now.  Beyond that, I very much do not agree with many of the things Bush stands for or against, from provisions of the Patriot Act to stem cell research.  I recognize, however, as do many others in this country, that the War on Terror is real, not a “metaphorical war” as the left likes to allege, and that victory in this war is vital not only to the continued existence of the United States and the lives and well-being of its inhabitants, but also to the continued life of the “liberal democratic” (in the old, historic sense of the terms) Enlightenment values which have always stood at the core of what it means to be an American, in America and around the world.  Such intellectual and institutional treasures for the future of mankind (America's crown jewels) are worth defending, indeed worth dying for, and I support vigorously, enthusiastically, appreciatively, Bush's radicalism in defense of liberty.