Ridding the world of all nuclear weapons
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Maswood Alam Khan
US President Barack Obama on April 5th while addressing a cheering crowd in Prague offered the world a goal of eradicating nuclear weapons. The word 'eradicating', on hearing the news, may have evoked some people's memory about a revolutionary programme that had been undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) to 'eradicate' smallpox from the face of this world. Smallpox and nuclear weapons sound somewhat similar to elicit dread of death. Both the scourges are fatal and can be used as lethal weapons in a war; one as a thermonuclear weapon and the other as a biological weapon. Smallpox has already been eradicated. Nuclear weapons are yet to be.
Superpowers geared with nuclear weapons are of late ostensibly agreeable to reduce these lethal arsenals, countries without nuclear weapons are pledging not to acquire them and almost all countries including Bangladesh are eager to harness this prodigious power for their civilian uses. What scares the peace-loving people of the world most is the prospect of nuclear-armed civilian-turned-militia terrorists. Unless production of fissile materials intended to produce nuclear weapons is stopped for good and all the stockpiles of nuclear weapons destroyed into ashes, the spectre of nuclear world wars and nuclear street fights will continue haunting the humanity. A similar spectre -- an apparition of biological warfare through spraying variola virus of smallpox on the enemy land -- haunted the world until December 1979 when this dreadful disease could be completely eradicated.
Countries have been advocating for decades to arrest the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Visualizing the awful devastation of a nuclear catastrophe former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once said: "After a nuclear exchange the living would envy the dead". Still, countries, big or small, are only speaking about horrors of nuclear wars with no visible respite from their stockpiling arsenals of nuclear weapons. Those countries who have the nuclear armouries want to keep them intact in case big boys want to play with them. It is great to hear great speeches by Khrushchev and Obama on casting gloom of a nuclear war and on eradicating nuclear weapons from the world. At the end of the day their speeches are dismissed as empty rhetoric because they do not mean what they say -- because they do not allow charity to begin at their own homes.
The prestigious weekly The Economist in its cover story of their current issue headlined: "A nuclear-free world may never come about, but there can be safety in trying". Thanks to the modal verb 'may', the statement, 'A nuclear-free world may never come about', contains a hidden hope that the world may also one day be nuclear-free.
That the world could one day be smallpox-free was also once beyond humanity's imagination when millions of people had to take smallpox as the sure death sentence from the Providence. Scientists later who had sweated in their laboratories in their fights against smallpox gave assurance that it was only a matter of time they would arrest the smallpox virus and that the humanity would one day be freed from the scourge. Biologists were circumspect in forecasting their successes. But the idea 'that the world may never be smallpox-free' never took place in their minds. Self-confidence spurred them into action. And the successful vaccination against smallpox was ultimately the fruition of their unflinching researches.
Knowing full well that a few exchanges of nuclear weapons will annihilate the whole spectrum of life from our Earth, superpowers are still helpless in ridding the world of these apocalyptic weapons. Knowing full well that the rogue North Korean regime's pastime is to fondle and flirt with nuclear weapons, the world is powerless in lassoing the wayward regime. Knowing full well that Israel already holds a robust arsenal of nuclear weapons, America dared not breathe a word of warning against the country. Knowing full well that Iran would never use their nuclear knowledge in producing nuclear weapons, the superpowers are threatening actions against this non-nuclear country.
People interested in history only read about the nightmarish death and destruction the atom bombs had let loose on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. But the world has not seen for more than five decades the ugly appearance of nuclear attacks and hence the need for an immediate end of nuclear armament has not been so much felt. If millions would have died in a matter of a few minutes by a nuclear attack or a nuclear accident, powers at the helm would perhaps taken some hurried measures to detain nuclear proliferation. Smallpox would not have been eradicated so early if the disease didn't incessantly kill people.
It seems the world riddled with nuclear weapons has automatically been immunized against nuclear warfare out of fears of mutually assured destruction. Nuclear weaponry has been the vaccine against nuclear war the way forms of smallpox pathogens (bacteria and viruses of smallpox) are the antigenic materials forming the vaccine against smallpox. Unless severe punches are landed on the abdomens of Kim-like President of North Korea and Bush-like President of America possibility of exchanging nuclear missiles is very far-fetched.
We would continue hearing harangues of America, Russia, Britain, France, and China -- five officially registered nuclear powers -- against nuclear armaments; some of them have also reduced the number of weapons as they don't need as many weapons to decimate the whole Earth as they have in their silos.
Many countries, that have already test-detonated nuclear bombs, have already signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) pledging that they would no more test the bomb. But Pakistan, a new member of the nuclear club, won't accept a test ban unless India, another new member, does the same. Dewy-eyed India officially decries the nuclear anathema and supports the test ban at full-throated voice, knowing well that others like Pakistan will do the blocking for it making NPT perpetually futile. Before we can rid the world of nuclear weapons, we have to get rid of hypocrisy and double standards first.
Unless nuclear powers officially abolish their own nukes in exchange for keeping others from seeking the bomb, NPT would never be an effective tool to stop nuclear propagation. Nevertheless, a world free of nuclear weapons would not be a world free of strategic bombers or inter-continental ballastic missiles (ICBMs), capable of incinerating a city with non-nuclear munitions! We may outlaw guns alright, but then only the outlaws will have cannons, if guns are unavailable. It took hundreds of years of continuous fight against smallpox that killed about 500 million people in the 20th century alone before the humanity could be freed from this dreadful disease. President Obama said that eradication of nuclear weapons won't be possible in his lifetime. How many years or centuries will it take and how many lives will have to be sacrificed before the end of nuclear anathema are questions that can be answered by how sincere the heads of superpowers are in their vindication.
In this age of digital civilization when information are processed at the speed of light and technological revolution when life can be tempered through genetic engineering and when laptops have become as commonplace as wristwatches and nano robots can travel through human veins and arteries to repair damaged cells NPT will never stand in the way of the outlaws' acquiring knowledge to create pocket weapons that may be much more deadlier than those weighty atom bombs. Killing as a passion will reign supreme in our society as long as humans will be driven by their innate desire to take vengeance on their rivals and enemies no matter nuclear weapons are reduced or eradicated. What is now needed is a vaccination against this vengeance that will modulate humans to fight with their rivals only in their playgrounds, not in the battlefields.
Human mind, sometimes kind and at times vengeful, is still an enigma. Though scientists sent men to the moon, spacecrafts to the Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats -- the human mind -- has remained almost dark.
But of late scientists are shedding glows on those dark faculties of human mind and turning the seemingly impossible into suddenly probable, thanks to an emerging science called neuroscience, the study of the brain.
A question that for ages has boggled minds of scientists and artists alike was: "How on earth can human brains, a clump of tissues, capture everything-poems, emotional reactions, locations of favourite spots, distant childhood scenes?" After long and arduous searches neuroscientists at last found some minuscule objects herded like sardines in a remote corner of an animal's brain that they have baptized as PKMzeta molecules responsible to retain memories, both joyful and painful. With a drug called ZIP injected into an animal's body they have been successful to edit or erase memories of those experimental animals.
Neuroscientists are now saying it is a matter of time when human memories too can be edited or erased to reboot human brains with fresh and noble ideas that are necessary for the peaceful living of humans on this earth-erasing for good those destructive memories and convictions that have long been driving humans to kill their rivals.
Looking forward to the day when a vaccination programme against vengeance would be launched in Bangladesh to erase our destructive memories when our progenies would wonder why their ancestors did kill each other! Why did the Awami League stalwarts land on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party stalwarts a TIT for a TAT earlier landed by BNP on AL in the past?
The writer is a banker. He may be reached on maswood@hotmail.com
US President Barack Obama on April 5th while addressing a cheering crowd in Prague offered the world a goal of eradicating nuclear weapons. The word 'eradicating', on hearing the news, may have evoked some people's memory about a revolutionary programme that had been undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) to 'eradicate' smallpox from the face of this world. Smallpox and nuclear weapons sound somewhat similar to elicit dread of death. Both the scourges are fatal and can be used as lethal weapons in a war; one as a thermonuclear weapon and the other as a biological weapon. Smallpox has already been eradicated. Nuclear weapons are yet to be.
Superpowers geared with nuclear weapons are of late ostensibly agreeable to reduce these lethal arsenals, countries without nuclear weapons are pledging not to acquire them and almost all countries including Bangladesh are eager to harness this prodigious power for their civilian uses. What scares the peace-loving people of the world most is the prospect of nuclear-armed civilian-turned-militia terrorists. Unless production of fissile materials intended to produce nuclear weapons is stopped for good and all the stockpiles of nuclear weapons destroyed into ashes, the spectre of nuclear world wars and nuclear street fights will continue haunting the humanity. A similar spectre -- an apparition of biological warfare through spraying variola virus of smallpox on the enemy land -- haunted the world until December 1979 when this dreadful disease could be completely eradicated.
Countries have been advocating for decades to arrest the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Visualizing the awful devastation of a nuclear catastrophe former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once said: "After a nuclear exchange the living would envy the dead". Still, countries, big or small, are only speaking about horrors of nuclear wars with no visible respite from their stockpiling arsenals of nuclear weapons. Those countries who have the nuclear armouries want to keep them intact in case big boys want to play with them. It is great to hear great speeches by Khrushchev and Obama on casting gloom of a nuclear war and on eradicating nuclear weapons from the world. At the end of the day their speeches are dismissed as empty rhetoric because they do not mean what they say -- because they do not allow charity to begin at their own homes.
The prestigious weekly The Economist in its cover story of their current issue headlined: "A nuclear-free world may never come about, but there can be safety in trying". Thanks to the modal verb 'may', the statement, 'A nuclear-free world may never come about', contains a hidden hope that the world may also one day be nuclear-free.
That the world could one day be smallpox-free was also once beyond humanity's imagination when millions of people had to take smallpox as the sure death sentence from the Providence. Scientists later who had sweated in their laboratories in their fights against smallpox gave assurance that it was only a matter of time they would arrest the smallpox virus and that the humanity would one day be freed from the scourge. Biologists were circumspect in forecasting their successes. But the idea 'that the world may never be smallpox-free' never took place in their minds. Self-confidence spurred them into action. And the successful vaccination against smallpox was ultimately the fruition of their unflinching researches.
Knowing full well that a few exchanges of nuclear weapons will annihilate the whole spectrum of life from our Earth, superpowers are still helpless in ridding the world of these apocalyptic weapons. Knowing full well that the rogue North Korean regime's pastime is to fondle and flirt with nuclear weapons, the world is powerless in lassoing the wayward regime. Knowing full well that Israel already holds a robust arsenal of nuclear weapons, America dared not breathe a word of warning against the country. Knowing full well that Iran would never use their nuclear knowledge in producing nuclear weapons, the superpowers are threatening actions against this non-nuclear country.
People interested in history only read about the nightmarish death and destruction the atom bombs had let loose on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. But the world has not seen for more than five decades the ugly appearance of nuclear attacks and hence the need for an immediate end of nuclear armament has not been so much felt. If millions would have died in a matter of a few minutes by a nuclear attack or a nuclear accident, powers at the helm would perhaps taken some hurried measures to detain nuclear proliferation. Smallpox would not have been eradicated so early if the disease didn't incessantly kill people.
It seems the world riddled with nuclear weapons has automatically been immunized against nuclear warfare out of fears of mutually assured destruction. Nuclear weaponry has been the vaccine against nuclear war the way forms of smallpox pathogens (bacteria and viruses of smallpox) are the antigenic materials forming the vaccine against smallpox. Unless severe punches are landed on the abdomens of Kim-like President of North Korea and Bush-like President of America possibility of exchanging nuclear missiles is very far-fetched.
We would continue hearing harangues of America, Russia, Britain, France, and China -- five officially registered nuclear powers -- against nuclear armaments; some of them have also reduced the number of weapons as they don't need as many weapons to decimate the whole Earth as they have in their silos.
Many countries, that have already test-detonated nuclear bombs, have already signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) pledging that they would no more test the bomb. But Pakistan, a new member of the nuclear club, won't accept a test ban unless India, another new member, does the same. Dewy-eyed India officially decries the nuclear anathema and supports the test ban at full-throated voice, knowing well that others like Pakistan will do the blocking for it making NPT perpetually futile. Before we can rid the world of nuclear weapons, we have to get rid of hypocrisy and double standards first.
Unless nuclear powers officially abolish their own nukes in exchange for keeping others from seeking the bomb, NPT would never be an effective tool to stop nuclear propagation. Nevertheless, a world free of nuclear weapons would not be a world free of strategic bombers or inter-continental ballastic missiles (ICBMs), capable of incinerating a city with non-nuclear munitions! We may outlaw guns alright, but then only the outlaws will have cannons, if guns are unavailable. It took hundreds of years of continuous fight against smallpox that killed about 500 million people in the 20th century alone before the humanity could be freed from this dreadful disease. President Obama said that eradication of nuclear weapons won't be possible in his lifetime. How many years or centuries will it take and how many lives will have to be sacrificed before the end of nuclear anathema are questions that can be answered by how sincere the heads of superpowers are in their vindication.
In this age of digital civilization when information are processed at the speed of light and technological revolution when life can be tempered through genetic engineering and when laptops have become as commonplace as wristwatches and nano robots can travel through human veins and arteries to repair damaged cells NPT will never stand in the way of the outlaws' acquiring knowledge to create pocket weapons that may be much more deadlier than those weighty atom bombs. Killing as a passion will reign supreme in our society as long as humans will be driven by their innate desire to take vengeance on their rivals and enemies no matter nuclear weapons are reduced or eradicated. What is now needed is a vaccination against this vengeance that will modulate humans to fight with their rivals only in their playgrounds, not in the battlefields.
Human mind, sometimes kind and at times vengeful, is still an enigma. Though scientists sent men to the moon, spacecrafts to the Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats -- the human mind -- has remained almost dark.
But of late scientists are shedding glows on those dark faculties of human mind and turning the seemingly impossible into suddenly probable, thanks to an emerging science called neuroscience, the study of the brain.
A question that for ages has boggled minds of scientists and artists alike was: "How on earth can human brains, a clump of tissues, capture everything-poems, emotional reactions, locations of favourite spots, distant childhood scenes?" After long and arduous searches neuroscientists at last found some minuscule objects herded like sardines in a remote corner of an animal's brain that they have baptized as PKMzeta molecules responsible to retain memories, both joyful and painful. With a drug called ZIP injected into an animal's body they have been successful to edit or erase memories of those experimental animals.
Neuroscientists are now saying it is a matter of time when human memories too can be edited or erased to reboot human brains with fresh and noble ideas that are necessary for the peaceful living of humans on this earth-erasing for good those destructive memories and convictions that have long been driving humans to kill their rivals.
Looking forward to the day when a vaccination programme against vengeance would be launched in Bangladesh to erase our destructive memories when our progenies would wonder why their ancestors did kill each other! Why did the Awami League stalwarts land on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party stalwarts a TIT for a TAT earlier landed by BNP on AL in the past?
The writer is a banker. He may be reached on maswood@hotmail.com