Today is the 61st anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in war - Hiroshima. On Wednesday we 'celebrate' the second use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in war - Nagasaki. There have been 61 years' worth of arguments back and forth on the issue of whether or not such weapons should have been developed at all, whether or not they should be deployed in wars, and whether or not they should be deployed against civilians rather than military targets. I won't re-hash those arguments.

For 45 years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the possession, enhancement and targeting of nuclear WMDs served to prevent all-out war between the primary nuclear powers - the USSR and the USA. Other nations were allowed to develop nuclear weapons as well, a "proliferation" that proceeded by alliances with one major power or the other, further allowing major power nukes to be sited on foreign soil for strategic purposes.

The concept of deterrence-by-fear (of nukes) was called "MAD" - Mutual Assured Destruction - and it was all about targeting civilian populations to assure that if anyone launched, their nation would be totally destroyed as well. Meanwhile, the warheads got bigger and badder, the rockets got more reliable, the bases became more mobile, and the targeting got more precise. For awhile there, the powers had submarines (the "silent service") patrolling deep beneath the world's oceans and seas avoiding detection, armed with multiple-MIRV'ed intercontinental ballistic missiles in sufficient numbers to carry out the MAD directive all by themselves even if no other delivery systems survived to strike.

One sub could rise anywhere in the world, launch its payload, and utterly destroy the enemy's nation. Multiply that by the total number of deployed Polaris and Trident submarines and you're talking about the death of every life form on earth (save a few bugs and microbes). Evolutionary suicide writ large.

In the end the USSR went flat broke trying to keep up with the overkill, and fell apart. The good ol' Cold War came to a rather abrupt end thanks to the madness of MAD. Suddenly the security of all those many redundant nukes in countries Russia no longer controlled became an issue, and a new concern arose for the alliances - "counterproliferation." Yet despite all attempts to secure the technology, a steady parade of second-world nations have managed to develop or obtain nuclear weapons for their own use. China, India, Pakistan, Israel (though they never admitted it)… and the newest members of the nuclear club may be North Korea and Iran if their programs go forward unimpeded.

Overkill is still an issue - getting worse - and the world is still immersed in its nuclear MADness despite the Cold War's end. Many scientists and ethicists and laymen have over the years questioned the morality of developing such weapons in the first place, and using them against humans in a blatantly suicidal manner. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, physicists who personally helped to develop the weapons during WWII, both became outspoken opponents of nuclear weaponry. For what that opposition was worth, which wasn't much. This is history, and this is the present. It still clouds our future more than a decade and a half since the Cold War was 'won'.

Now, thanks to the genetic end of biological science, there is a new type of WMD in development that further darkens the future and once again leaves humanity with a bitter distrust of science - and the scientists who work to kill rather than to enhance or protect life. The Washington Post reported just one week ago on the developing situation:

In an unusual arrangement, the building itself will be classified as highly restricted space, from the reception desk to the lab benches to the cages where animals are kept. Few federal facilities, including nuclear labs, operate with such stealth. It is this opacity that some arms-control experts say has become a defining characteristic of U.S. biodefense policy as carried out by the Department of Homeland Security, NBACC's creator.

Since the department's founding in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, its officials have dramatically expanded the government's ability to conduct realistic tests of the pathogens and tactics that might be used in a bioterrorism attack. Some of the research falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons.

So… what are they creating in this super-secret facility, and why should we be concerned? On Monday, July 31, the Post published another article in the series about what is being produced in government labs for DHS to "test"…

Wimmer intended to sound a warning, to show that science had crossed a threshold into an era in which genetically altered and made-from-scratch germ weapons were feasible. But in the four years since, other scientists have made advances faster than Wimmer imagined possible. Government officials, and scientists such as Wimmer, are only beginning to grasp the implications.

"The future," he said, "has already come."

We here at Telic Thoughts have discussed in several blogs the reasons why the general public tends to be distrustful of science's amoral base, and distrustful of scientists who seem to believe the public should blindly believe whatever they have to say, even when what they say threatens everything the public holds dear - including life itself. Please read the linked articles (even if you have to register - it's free and instantaneous) if you wish to comment, so the breadth of this subject can be reasonably addressed.

I offer this blog on this anniversary because the future is more important than the past - we learn (or should learn) what the past has to teach us about ourselves so that there will be a future. There are many things we should never forget.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Bioethics, Biology, History, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/remembering-the-past-guarding-the-future/trackback/