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July
1, 2003
Weapons in Search of a Name
Let's
Reserve WMD for the Really Big Ones, You Know Made-in-America
Bombs
By
DAVID LINDORFF
We need a new name for WMDs.
I for one am sick of hearing about Weapons
of Mass Destruction--those alleged chemical, biological and dirty
nuke bombs that the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden
are supposed to covet for use against us innocent Americans.
I'm especially sick of hearing about them from President Bush,
who has a way of slurring the words together into a kind of single
noun.
What is the real definition of a weapon
of mass destruction, anyhow?
Presumably it's a weapon that kills a
whole lot of people indiscriminately. More people than a land
mine or a typical bomb, I suppose.
Okay, top of the list would have to be
a nuclear bomb, then. That's clearly a WMD. No contest. And who's
got those? Not Saddam, and not Osama. We do. Britain does. So
do China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel and (or so it and the
White  House claim) North Korea.
How about cluster bombs? Some of those
things, dropped in an urban area or in the midst of an encampment
of troops, could easily kill hundreds of people--maybe thousands.
Ditto that new weapon built by the U.S. for use in Iraq, fortunately
too late to be used: the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs), a 16-ton
monster bomb so big it has to be pushed out the back of a transport
plane. That sucker could kill tens of thousands of people if
dropped in a populated area. Clearly both these are WMDs.
Likewise the propane bomb that was first
used in the first Gulf War, and later in Afghanistan, and probably
in the latest war in Iraq. This baby releases a giant cloud of
propane which spreads over acres of land before being ignited
in an enormous flash fire. Again, clearly a WMD. Note that these--up
to and including nukes--are all weapons that are owned and used
by the U.S. military.
We might well also consider inadvertent
WMDs--the mines sown by U.S. forces that kill and maim thousands
of innocents for years after a war ends, and the depleted uranium
bombs and shells, thousands of tons of which were used in the
recent invasion of Iraq, which incinerate their targets causing,
sometimes, massive loss of life, but which also poison the environment
with radioactive dust that will hang around causing untold numbers
of cancer cases for a billion years to come.
Clearly, if the words Weapons of Mass
Destruction are to mean anything, all the above weapons are WMDs.
But when the White House or Downing Street or the Pentagon talk
about WMDs, they aren't talking about any of those things. They're
talking about germ weapons, about toxic chemical weapons, or
about so-called "dirty bombs."
Thing is, most of those weapons are either
virtual--nobody's ever used one or seen one--and moreover, if
they were used, their kill potential would probably be pretty
small--a lot smaller than some of the weapons that are now routinely
used by the U.S. military.
Take dirty nuke bombs. Most experts say
that these would be made of ordinary explosives embedded in some
kind of nuclear waste products, such as uranium dust, cadmium,
radioactive iodine or some other nasty chemical. The idea would
be to blow the bomb, and spread the fall-out as widely as possible.
But experts also say that the likely number of deaths from such
a weapon, even if exploded in an urban center, would be small
--perhaps at most a few hundred. More would probably die of the
actual detonator explosion, if it were detonated in a crowded
spot, than from any fallout. This is because in a developed country
like the U.S., there would be treatments available for those
who suffered contamination.
The biggest threat from such a bomb would
be panic, and the commercial losses to properties that would
have to be decontaminated before they could be used again. A
dirty nuke then, far from being a WMD, is probably more of an
ACW (anti-capitalism weapon).
Chemical weapons are even less scary.
As a group of self-styled millenialist terrorists in Japan who
tried deploying a Sarin WMD, killing only a handful of subway
riders, discovered, it's not that easy to make chemical weapons
kill a lot of people. You need luck, because the weather has
to cooperate, and a lot of control over the situation. Saddam
Hussein was able to kill a lot of his own people and a lot of
Iranians back during the Iran-Iraq war because he had control
over the skies, and was able to drop numbers of poison gas bombs
in towns or over battlefields at the time of his choosing. Terrorists
would have a hard time replicating this. More likely would be
a single bomb, and again, in a country like the U.S., should
such an attack happen, the resources are there to minimize the
impact, as was the case in Tokyo. Once again, it's a stretch
calling such weapons, especially the home-made weapons terrorists
would likely use, WMDs.
Germ weapons are even more problematic.
Again experts say that most germs that could cause disease are
not that easy to disseminate. Some, like Anthrax, can be very
dangerous, but don't spread beyond those initially exposed (look
at the anthrax attack that did occur in September, 2001, which
caused enormous economic losses, but only five deaths, making
it not a WMD, but just another ACW). Others, like Smallpox, can
spread after release, but are hard to disseminate initially--and
devilishly hard to work with without becoming exposed oneself.
In any event, in a modern society with an ample healthcare infrastructure,
such bombs would again likely cause few deaths, at least compared
to the genuine WMD's filling in the Pentagon's arsenal.
The main function of the weapons that
terrorists might use (assuming they don't get ahold of one of
the Pentagon's nastier toys) is really to sow fear and panic,
and in that respect, any of the big three--dirty bombs, germ
weapons or chemical weapons--could be highly effective. A dirty
bomb detonated in Manhattan would probably kill far more people
by trampling and car collisions than by actually exposing them
to radiation. Ditto for a germ or chemical weapon.
So, with that in mind, it's time to rename
these things. Let's save WMD for weapons that really do kill,
or have the potential to kill, thousands of humans. That would
mean things like nuclear bombs, cluster bombs, MOABs, propane
bombs and the like. Good American weapons, that is.
As for the terrorist weapons, let's call
them WMH for Weapons of Mass Hysteria.
Once we start recognizing them for what
they are, maybe people will start asking why the Bush Administration
keeps harping on these things as a threat to America's way of
life. You really do have to wonder what the hell these guys are
really trying to do when they keep going around trying to scare
the living shit out of the American public. If the purpose of
terrorist terror weapons is to sow terror, why is the Administration
so busy priming the pump?
After all, remember back during the dark
days of the Cold War, when U.S. and Soviet bombers and missiles
stood poised and ready to initiate mutual annihilation on 15
minutes' notice. Back then, the guys in the Pentagon and the
White House didn't tell us to panic. On the contrary, they routinely
used to assure us that we didn't have to worry. We'd survive
an attack and go on to win.
It was a ridiculous lie, but the point
is, they didn't try to scare us into simpering passivity. Rather,
they tried to get us to buck up and stick with the program, which
was building more and more of these genuine WMDs.
These days, when America is the preeminent
superpower in the globe, they seem bent on scaring us, the citizenry,
out of our wits.
Why? On the evidence of the past two
years, it looks like the goal is to get us to acquiesce in the
evisceration of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
So maybe WMH is the wrong term. Maybe
we should call these virtual terrorists' weapons WCEs--for Weapons
of Constitutional Eradication.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
Weekend Edition
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