Nuclear Security
There are no guarantees in life. Once a discovery has been made there is no turning back. No stuffing the Genie back into its lamp, and more's the pity.The reason we have those celebrated Nobel prices, most notably the Nobel Peace Prize, results from the guilt felt by Albert Nobel in unleashing upon the world the power of explosives, realizing his inventions would be used for humanly-inimical purposes, causing him to attempt to make amends to posterity.
Those who worked at Los Alamos to perfect the Atomic Bomb well realized what they were engaged in, but there were those who were forevermore haunted by the real understanding of what they had accomplished, post Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They rationalized that if they weren't successful, other regimes less stable than that of the United States would attain nuclear fission feasibility.
Now we have a ever-fractious world in which too many diverse countries, stable and otherwise, are in possession of nuclear technology capable of producing nuclear armaments. There are too many countries whose serial administrations are unstable and whose bellicose intentions stated against neighbour states make the world a most vulnerable place in their ownership of nuclear technology.
And here is Pakistan, whose chief atomic scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan went on a rampage of wholesale leakage to the highest bidders, empowering countries like Iran, Libya and North Korea to access nuclear technology. A country whose celebrated prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pledged to give his people Bread, Clothing, Shelter - but not before he brought in an era of nuclear weaponry.
He is long gone, and his ambitious daughter Benazir Bhutto too, has been dispatched. By the very forces she once tolerated, then turned against; the violently-engaged jihadists so liberally funded in Pakistan by Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. Too late for her the realization that the Islamists whom her father's successor, General Zia, brought into the political and religious arena, along with Sharia Law, would defy eventual democracy.
Now a severely destabilized Pakistan, always on the brink of hostilities with India, itself encouraging jihadists doing their blood-letting there and in Afghanistan, holds the world's attention with the horror that might be unleashed should extremists who have fully infiltrated the country's political, military and social hierarchy come to power.
At which time nothing stands between jihadist terrorists availing themselves of nuclear weaponry.
For those "really brave boys killed her". And that's just for starters.
Labels: Technology, Terrorism, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 29, 2007
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