Category Archives: Germ Warfare

Africa acts as Earths petri dish. The equatorial area of Africa is warm, wet, thick with vegetation and dense with animal life (monkeys and apes) that, unfortunately, share over 90 percent of their DNA with human beings. What nature creates in this naturally occurring biological warfare lab may start as a virus peculiar only to one biological sector, but can evolve into one peculiar to primates and at that point it is transferable to humans we are primates. Many nasty diseases, both viral and microbial, got their start in the upper story plants of Africa, adapted to monkeys and then were shared with humans: AIDS, Ebola, Hanta virus, MarburgZika. This list literally goes from A to Z.

Zika was first identified in Uganda in 1947 (though it may have developed during the late 1800s) at which time it was confined to monkeys. By 1952 the first human infection was reported. The disease then marched across the African continent from east to west along the hot zone: The Central African Republic, Nigeria, The Ivory Coast (Cte Diviore), Burkina Faso, Sierra Leon, Senegal and the islands of Cabo Verde. From Africa the disease was spread to Asia and Micronesia.

The first massive human outbreak occurred on Yap Island in 2007 in the western Pacific Ocean. Last year, there was great concern for Olympic athletes and those who were attending the summer games in Rio de Janeiro as Brazil reported thousands of cases of the virus. So far, over 35,000 cases have been reported in Puerto Rico, and 1,134 cases in Florida, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The Texas Department of State Health Services reports since 2015 there have been 333 cases of Zika in Texas, including two cases so far this year in Cameron County and six cases reported in 2016 in Hidalgo County.

Many of these cases are among people who have not traveled beyond our shores and who were infected by home-grown mosquitos.

So its clear that Zika is here. And it will spread.

This disease is a virus spread by both mosquitoes and the victims it infects. Once you are bitten by a Zika-bearing mosquito you will be infected. Some people have no symptoms, others feel like they have a mild cold and the worst afflicted suffer Gullian-Barre syndrome, which damages the nervous system. If you are pregnant the virus can attack your unborn child and result in microcephaly, that is, the skull of the infant will be truncated, the brain unable to develop and the child permanently and fatally impaired. Less discussed, but known for some time, is the fact that infected men can have the virus alive and transmissible in their sperm for close to a year.

Right now, Zika can be transmitted in three different ways. (1) A traveler to a Zika heavy area (like Central America) can be bitten by a mosquito and becomes infected. (2) That person returns to the United States and then is bitten by a local mosquito that acquires the virus and then passes it on to people in this country. (3) A person who is infected has unprotected sex and passes on the virus to their partner.

Zika is not the germ that wakes me up at night in a cold sweat. That position is occupied by the eventual evolution of bird flu to an airborne, human-to-human, contagion. That one will most certainly thin the herd and none of us will escape its sorrow. But Zika does remind all of us that, like the invading Martians of H. G. Wells War of the Worlds, which eventually succumbed to microbes of Earths atmosphere, we are always at risk from the smallest life forms on this planet.

Living things constantly change, not by plan but by accident. Some of those changes (like allowing a virus to live in multiple living things) help an organism live longer and stronger. That organism will flourish. This is called survival of the fittest. It is an example of evolution. Deny evolution and you deny science. Deny science and you deny reality.

Louise Butler is a retired teacher, college professor and published author who lives in Edinburg and regularly writes for The Monitors Board of Contributors.

Read this article:

Zika a virus transferable to primates - Valley morning Star

Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

"Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die"

By Garrett Graff

Simon & Schuster. 529 pp. $28

Garrett Graff says that his new book, "Raven Rock," a detailed exploration of the United States' doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of "how nuclear war would have actually worked the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed ... as leaders realized the horrors ahead."

But if there is anything that "Raven Rock" proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that "my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place" to ensure the survival of the presidency. And after Richard Nixon's first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1,000 warheads national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the president's dismay with his alternatives: "If that's all there is, he won't do it."

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as "a blur of acronyms and charts, minimizing the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook," and at times this book commits the same offense.

Its power, however, lies in the author's eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet "the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government," Graff writes. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on Sept. 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. "That's what deputies are for," the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials. Apparently the wives of President Dwight Eisenhower's Cabinet members were less than pleased to learn that they had not made the list, even while their husbands' secretaries had. And when an administration representative handed Earl Warren the ID card that would grant him access to a secure facility in an emergency, the chief justice replied, "I don't see the pass for Mrs. Warren." Told that he was among the country's 2,000 most important people, Warren handed the card back. "Well, here," he said, "you'll have room for one more important official."

Perhaps the presence of the Supreme Court would prove inconvenient, anyway, because a post-nuclear America could easily become "an executive branch dictatorship," Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the U.S. economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food. When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of prewritten, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime. And the Eisenhower-era Emergency Government Censorship Board, rechristened the Wartime Information Security Program under Nixon, was finally defunded after Watergate. However, as Graff notes, "the executive orders all still remained drafted ready for an emergency when it arrived."

For all the ominous directives and war scenarios, there is something random and even comical about planning for Armageddon. How many Export-Import Bank staffers rate rescuing? How many from the Department of Agriculture? A Justice Department public affairs official was once even tasked with compiling a lineup of Washington journalists who should be saved. "I remember painfully going over a list of people and wondering how do you balance a columnist I didn't think very much of as opposed to a reporter who I thought really did work," he said. And then, what should the chosen few take along? The congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, for instance, included a stash of bourbon and wine; staffers "swore that the stockpile was to be used only to aid a hypothetical alcoholic congressman who might need to be weaned off."

"Raven Rock" revels in the expensive machinery and elaborate contingency formulas presidents had at their disposal to command the nuclear arsenal. High-tech ships known as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (nicknamed the "Floating White House") were ready for use from 1962 into the Nixon years, while a string of EC-135 aircraft flights (code-named "Looking Glass") began continuous shifts on Feb. 3, 1961, ensuring that one senior military leader with the proper authority would always be available to order a nuclear strike. Not "breaking the chain" of these overlapping flights became an U.S. military obsession, and it remained unbroken until the end of the Cold War.

Some efforts were low-tech, too: In 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order decreeing that the Postal Service would be responsible for delivering "medical countermeasures" to homes across America in case of biological attacks, because it had a unique capacity for "rapid residential delivery." (Neither snow nor rain, nor germ warfare.)

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centers. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2,200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward U.S. targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five U.S. missiles heading toward the U.S.S.R. except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. "The Soviet early warning system was a dangerous mess," Graff writes. Ours wasn't that great, either.

Over the decades, shifts in nuclear policy reflected presidents' views on what was possible, technologically and strategically. Eisenhower planned for "massive retaliation" attacks, Kennedy relied on the notion of mutually assured destruction, and Carter imagined a drawn-out war, in which an initial nuclear exchange could produce weeks of inaction before follow-up strikes. Ronald Reagan issued a presidential directive suggesting for the first time that the United States should "prevail" in a nuclear war, even if the 1983 television movie "The Day After" later left him feeling "greatly depressed," as he wrote in his diary.

For all the horrors it contemplates, "Raven Rock" proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defense as a priority, officials quickly realized how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes. "Rather than remake the entire society," Graff writes, "the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die."

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that "it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property."

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world.

Read more here:

Book review: How U.S. presidents prepare for the end of the world - Pocono Record

"Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die" by Garrett Graff.

"Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die" by Garrett Graff.

Book World: How U.S. presidents prepare for the end of the world

Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die

By Garrett Graff

Simon & Schuster. 529 pp. $28

---

Garrett Graff says that his new book, "Raven Rock," a detailed exploration of the United States' doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of "how nuclear war would have actually worked - the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers - and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed ... as leaders realized the horrors ahead."

But if there is anything that "Raven Rock" proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that "my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place" to ensure the survival of the presidency. And after Richard Nixon's first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons - there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1,000 warheads - national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the president's dismay with his alternatives: "If that's all there is, he won't do it."

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as "a blur of acronyms and charts, minimizing the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook," and at times this book commits the same offense.

Its power, however, lies in the author's eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet "the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government," Graff writes. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on Sept. 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. "That's what deputies are for," the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials. Apparently the wives of President Dwight Eisenhower's Cabinet members were less than pleased to learn that they had not made the list, even while their husbands' secretaries had. And when an administration representative handed Earl Warren the ID card that would grant him access to a secure facility in an emergency, the chief justice replied, "I don't see the pass for Mrs. Warren." Told that he was among the country's 2,000 most important people, Warren handed the card back. "Well, here," he said, "you'll have room for one more important official."

Perhaps the presence of the Supreme Court would prove inconvenient, anyway, because a post-nuclear America could easily become "an executive branch dictatorship," Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the U.S. economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food. When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of prewritten, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime. And the Eisenhower-era Emergency Government Censorship Board, rechristened the Wartime Information Security Program under Nixon, was finally defunded after Watergate. However, as Graff notes, "the executive orders all still remained drafted - ready for an emergency when it arrived."

For all the ominous directives and war scenarios, there is something random and even comical about planning for Armageddon. How many Export-Import Bank staffers rate rescuing? How many from the Department of Agriculture? A Justice Department public affairs official was once even tasked with compiling a lineup of Washington journalists who should be saved. "I remember painfully going over a list of people and wondering how do you balance a columnist I didn't think very much of as opposed to a reporter who I thought really did work," he said. And then, what should the chosen few take along? The congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, for instance, included a stash of bourbon and wine; staffers "swore that the stockpile was to be used only to aid a hypothetical alcoholic congressman who might need to be weaned off."

"Raven Rock" revels in the expensive machinery and elaborate contingency formulas presidents had at their disposal to command the nuclear arsenal. High-tech ships known as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (nicknamed the "Floating White House") were ready for use from 1962 into the Nixon years, while a string of EC-135 aircraft flights (code-named "Looking Glass") began continuous shifts on Feb. 3, 1961, ensuring that one senior military leader with the proper authority would always be available to order a nuclear strike. Not "breaking the chain" of these overlapping flights became an U.S. military obsession, and it remained unbroken until the end of the Cold War.

Some efforts were low-tech, too: In 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order decreeing that the Postal Service would be responsible for delivering "medical countermeasures" to homes across America in case of biological attacks, because it had a unique capacity for "rapid residential delivery." (Neither snow nor rain, nor germ warfare.)

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centers. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2,200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward U.S. targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five U.S. missiles heading toward the U.S.S.R. - except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. "The Soviet early warning system was a dangerous mess," Graff writes. Ours wasn't that great, either.

Over the decades, shifts in nuclear policy reflected presidents' views on what was possible, technologically and strategically. Eisenhower planned for "massive retaliation" attacks, Kennedy relied on the notion of mutually assured destruction, and Carter imagined a drawn-out war, in which an initial nuclear exchange could produce weeks of inaction before follow-up strikes. Ronald Reagan issued a presidential directive suggesting for the first time that the United States should "prevail" in a nuclear war, even if the 1983 television movie "The Day After" later left him feeling "greatly depressed," as he wrote in his diary.

For all the horrors it contemplates, "Raven Rock" proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defense as a priority, officials quickly realized how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes. "Rather than remake the entire society," Graff writes, "the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die."

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that "it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property."

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world.

---

Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

Continue reading here:

Book World: How US presidents prepare for the end of the world - The Edwardsville Intelligencer

Last month President Trump authorized an attack that launched 50 Tomahawk missiles into Syria. That brought a personal experience back to me that I had long ago.

We all know that Syrias President Bashar Al-Assad has used biological weapons, or WMDs, against his own citizens. Sarin gas was just one of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Al-Assad has used over the years. His actions are beyond despicable. It is not unlike something Adolph Hitler would have done against the Jewish people if such biological weapons would have been available to him then.

The reason this was a personal experience was because of my service in the United States Army in the late 1950s. As a member of the 131st Medical Technical Intelligence Group, I joined a Mayor and a Sergeant Major and we were all assigned to a small intelligence unit. That was 1956 in Berlin, Germany.

The unit was in the espionage business. Both the Major and the Master Sergeant spoke German. I did not. We had all received Top Secret clearances and were assigned to gather as much information as possible from East Germany regarding biological weapons. At that time I still remember that we called it Germ Warfare.

Those two gentlemen and I were assigned to gather intelligence by meeting with people we referred to as sources. After those meetings my task was to microfilm documents and type a report which I forwarded immediately to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

One of my favorite memories of that time was that the other two guys regularly used a small tape recorder the size of a Walkman that they stuck into a back pocket. There was a long, thin cord which had to be put down the sleeve of the Major or Master Sergeants coat and plugged into an actual fake wrist watch, which was in fact was the microphone.

I remember that just one of the locations from which we gathered information was the Institute for Serum and Vaccine Testing located in Leipzig, Germany. That facility was then thought to be developing those kind of deadly weapons.

I was quartered in a private home in the then American sector of Berlin. The previous occupants had been a Jewish family that had been forcibly removed by Hitlers people.

Incidentally, my very own father, who served in the Canadian Army in World War One, was in France fighting the Germans when the new biological weapon of nerve gas was first used. Little did I know that I would be spending my last teenage years as a James Bond type and be actually located only a few miles from the then Berlin Wall.

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Twenty six countries have already prohibited use of these modern uncivilized weapons. In fact Syrias use of Sarin gas recently killed many innocent men, women and children. China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and America are known to have WMDs and are also capable of using them.

The information that bothers me most today is that the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, also has the ability to start using chemicals in warfare. And, that is tragic because I think he is one crazy bastard.

My take on the movies

I recommend The Circle.

If you are a techie I think you should enjoy watching Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and the late Bill Paxton in is final film appearance.

It also shows us that the power of women can easily be equal to the power of men. Duh.

Stan Statham served 1976-1994 in the California Assembly and was a television news anchor at KHSL-TV in Chico 1965-1975. He is past president of the California Broadcasters Association and can be reached at StanStatham@gmail.com.

Read the original post:

Stan Statham: My take on biological weapons - Red Bluff Daily News

Filmmaker and photographer Theo Anthony's 2015 short film "Peace in the Absence of War"was a spare snapshot of tragic irony, contrasting the crowded media and military spectacle around Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray with the route, unpopulated and ignored, on which Gray was killed by police in a van.

With "Rat Film," Anthony ups the ante on these distinctions. Be it rat poison or segregation laws, Baltimore is a city of firsts with national implications that gets treated like a last unless someone wants the National Guard to shut down a protest. Using every format at his disposal, Anthony pieces together a history of rat extermination and systemic racism, methods for both pioneered in Baltimore in a way that, the film suggests, is of no mere coincidence.

Initially, the film was just supposed to be a short about rats around Baltimore, and slowly began growing into a meditation on the variable meaning rats have depending on the race/class status of the person interacting with them. For residents of predominantly black areas of lower economic status, it generally means an infestation problem exacerbated by poor infrastructure. Residents talk of not being able to hang clothes to dry as rats will chew through them. Two enterprising men get a fishing pole, peanut butter, and turkey to devise a contraption for catching rats in sites of large infestation, which they then take care of with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, for some of the wealthy white residents in the film, the pests are more like pets, creatures they can watch movies with or serenade with a flute. One person, calling himself the "rat czar," makes weapons to hunt ratsnot as a solution to an overwhelming problem, but as a mere hobby.

After turning one corner too many, Anthony ended up in the files of Johns Hopkins University and found a connection worthy of an Ishmael Reed conspiracy, layering the film further. Mainly, university research on rat extermination and race-related social control were mutually beneficial. In the 1910s, Baltimore introduced an ordinance to segregate housing into black blocks and white blocks. When overturned by the courts, the city resorted to trumped-up code violations to enforce it by other means. In 1937, a "residential security map" was created that helped place poor, black, and "mixed" areas in redlined districts to be excluded from loans that would otherwise help migration to better parts of the city. Johns Hopkins, conveniently, was located in close proximity to one of these neighborhoods. For anyone still reeling from the false binary of Trump versus scientists presented at the March for Science, Anthony helpfully details at least one way the field has been co-opted to enhance the same civil liberties violations the current administration is amplifying to 11.

In 1942 (not mentioned in the film, but the same year when the Final Solution was decided upon), the U.S. feared the enemy would resort to germ warfare, using rats as a weapon. Since the source for rat poison was only found in Axis-controlled areas the U.S., scrambling to find a new serum, recruited Dr. Curt Richter, a psychobiologist at Johns Hopkins working on genetic research using rats. With grants from both the city and the Rockefeller foundation, and with a formula that was allowed to bypass federal inspection, the poison was field tested on the predominantly black neighborhood near the university, "an area frequently used for public health studies" and, presumably, preserved in its dilapidated state for the same reason. Soon dead rats were lining the streets. The neighborhood's poor infrastructure was designated as a rattrap worth targeting for further research, though the city would not address why the poor infrastructure existed in the first place.

Not content with just a historical context, "Rat Film" moves into a speculative future as well. The narrator, Maureen Jones, speaks with robotic wryness recalling the 2003 doc "The Corporation." We glide through a video game based on a Google map of Baltimore that grows increasingly less useful and more ominous the closer it gets to realistic simulation. Feigning respect for privacy, the invasive surveillance photography on Google Earth attempts to blur faces, but has trouble distinguishing between humans and inanimate objects. The more one attempts to overlay real photos over the digital simulation, the more the game glitches. The closer one gets to vacant lots and abandoned homes, cracks appear and the universe is glimpsed in the openings. It's an apt metaphor, where reducing populations to an algorithm that can be overlaid with a map is unwieldy and prone to failure. We also learn Maryland was the site of ethologist John Calhoun's "Behavioral Sink," a year-and-a-half-long study of rats in a contained area that gave insight into the effects of overcrowding in urban spaces. The findings? Societal collapse.

Darting from essayistic historiography to ruminative cyber-simulation to traditional interviews with residents directly affected by Baltimore's rat population, Anthony's methodology recalls in some ways Chris Marker's cyberpunk classic "Level Five," where Marker weaved together a fake WWII computer game, interviews with experts and survivors, and a melancholic travelogue to argue that advances in technology can't salvage the psychic and material damage done by war. "Rat Film" darts through multiple modes of analysis to examine how the damage still being done by structural violence remains largely ignored.

A maze with no out, the problems exposed here will only be exacerbated by policy as it currently stands.

"Rat Film," directed by Theo Anthony, screens on May 4 at 7:25 p.m., May 5 at noon, and May 6 at 10 p.m. in Parkway 1.

See the rest here:

We're The Rats: Theo Anthony's film-essay "Rat Film" frames what's wrong with Baltimore through its vermin - Baltimore City Paper

You probably didnt take a moment this weekend to toast the 20th anniversary of the global Chemical Weapons Convention. Maybe it slipped your mind. Or, given the horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria last month, maybe you felt any commemoration would ring hollow.

Yet the anniversary is worth honoring. The only international arms control treaty that bans an entire class of weapons, the CWC has been signed by 192 nations, and has resulted in the destruction of nearly 95 percent of the world's chemical weapons.

QuickTake Chemical Weapons

Granted, Im not disinterested. My family has its own history of involvement with chemical warfare. No, my grandfather wasnt on the front lines breathing in mustard gas like the poor sods memorialized in Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum Est, whose blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs. He was on the home front manufacturing it.

Lieutenant John R. Suydam was in what became the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, stationed first at American University in Washington, where nearby residents still dig up the toxic fruits of his units labor, and then at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, which was built in 1917 to produce chemical agents. According to the memoirs of one of his roommates at Columbia, where he got his PhD in chemistry, Grandpa had a delightful personality, but was somewhat absent-minded. One of his nicknames, apparently, was Foggy John. Little did his roomies know what kind of fog John would soon be putting down.

I was 11 when my grandfather died, and never had the chance to ask him, What exactly did you do during the Great War, Grandpa? But I do know now that Edgewood was making about 675 tons of toxic agents a week in late 1918, shipping the stuff to France. It was a dangerous business. I wouldnt be here today if he had died from absorption of deleterious gas, as one of the arsenals casualty reports artfully put it.

Nearly 30 percent of U.S. casualties during the First World War came from gas attacks. Relatively few died, but 70,000 to 90,000 were wounded, some to lifelong effect. My grandfathers commander, General Amos Fries, was something of a chemical evangelist: After the war, he fought a rear-guard action to keep the service intact, writing tracts like The Humanity of Poison Gas. He transmitted his enthusiasm to his men, whose proposed slogans for an Edgewood Arsenal newspaper included GAS killed the GERM in GERMany, and, less mellifluously, GAS warfare: a policemans club for world peace. Whether my grandfather carried any of this zeal into his decades as a chemistry teacher at St. Marks School in Southborough, Massachusetts, Ill thankfully never know.

Some four score years after Lieutenant Suydams Edgewood tour of duty, on April 4, 1997, I found myself in the Map Room at the White House, watching a white-gloved steward carefully peel a banana and proffer it to President Bill Clinton. We were at a pre-briefing for an event to garner support for the treaty, which was up for ratification in a recalcitrant Republican-controlled Senate. (I was a Foreign Service officer on detail to the National Security Council as a speechwriter.)

As Clinton reviewed his remarks, Rahm Emanuel, then Clintons senior adviser on politics and domestic policy, snarled, I dont hear the sound bite. Wheres the bite? Clinton munched on, nodding as National Security Adviser Sandy Berger briefed him.

The point of the event was to wrap the treaty in the mantle of as many Republican heavyweights as the administration could round up. So we had former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen Generals Colin Powell and David Jones, former strategic arms negotiators Paul Nitze and Edward Rowny, former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency head Kenneth Adelman, and a slew of others. This approach had other dividends: Even as Vice President Al Gore gave a bloviating address, former Secretary of State James Baker was crisp, forceful, to the point.

Many of the last-ditch objections to the treaty raised by Senator Jesse Helms, theNorth Carolina Republican who was leading the fight against it, were risible. He harped on how many potentially hostile nations were refusing to sign on. But as Clinton noted at a subsequent press briefing, keeping the U.S. out of the treaty until Russia joined would reduce U.S. leverage over Moscow. Waiting until rogue nations such as Iraq and Libya joined would likewise prevent the U.S. from using the treaty against them.

In the end, the treaty passed the Senate 74-26 on April 24, and entered into force five days later. Since then, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 -- has destroyed 68,000 metric tons of chemical weapons and 7.4 million munitions.

True, signing the CWC didnt stop Syria from using chemical weapons. But as Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me, Syria isnt an easy test case of the treatys effectiveness. For one thing, Syrias civil war made inspections harder; for another, even as the OPCW destroyed Syrias declared chemical weapons stocks, it made clear that Assads declarations had omissions and inconsistencies. Moreover, the organization repeatedly documented Syrias continued use of sarin, mustard and chlorine gas.

In short, the failure to hold Syria to account is a weakness not of the OPCW or the treaty, but of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council who drive enforcement. Russia has a lot to answer for, said Kimball.

So, too, does the U.S. Members of the Obama administration have downplayed their failure to punish Assad for crossing Obamas 2012 red line by pointing to the subsequent Russia-backed disarmament deal. But such protestations fall flat in the face of Obamas willingness to tolerate Assads later chemical attacks. If Obama had responded with a military strike after Assads use of sarin in August 2013 -- which killed more than 1,400 people -- smart diplomacy might well have secured the same disarmament deal, only with much greater deterrent effect.

Instead, enforcement of the taboo against chemical weapons was left to President Donald Trump, whose response to Syrias April 4 attack seemed much more influenced by grim footage of innocent babies, babies, little babiesthan violations of international treaties.

Thats too bad, because as an international instrument, the CWC faces some big challenges. Holdouts need to be brought on board, including Israel (which has signed but not ratified it) and Egypt (which helped Syria develop chemical and biological arsenals and is thought to have stocks that homegrown terrorists could potentially acquire). As technology evolves, so must the expertise and reach of inspectors. And 20 years after the CWC came into force, no member state has ever called for a challenge inspection, fearing a tit-for-tat response.

The building at Edgewood Arsenal where my grandfather worked was torn down a few years ago. And the U.S. has spent more than $5 billion since 1997 to destroy its chemical arsenal. But for taboos to retain their power, they must periodically be enforced, preferably by those who believe in them.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

Excerpt from:

What Did You Do During the Great Chemical War, Grandpa? - Bloomberg

Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Koreas relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

Excerpts from Atwoods summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated.

Atwood notes it is an American myth that the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact, the North/South border had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.

Part of what made the USs ultimate destruction of Korea (which involved essentially a colossal version of one of the cross-border incursions) inevitable was the goal of US planners to access or control global resources, markets and cheaper labor power.

In its full invasion of the North, the US acted under the banner of the United Nations. However, the UN at that time was largely under the control of the United States, and as Professor Carl Boggs (PhD political science, UC Berkeley) puts it, essentially was the United States. (28)

While it is still today the worlds most powerful military empire, the US was then at the peak of its global dominance the most concentrated power-center in world history. Almost all allies and enemies had been destroyed in World War II while the US strategically preserved its forces, experiencing just over 400,000 overall war-related deaths after Germany and Japan declared war on the US, whereas Russia, for example, lost tens of millions fending off the Nazi invasion. Boggs further notes that as the UN gradually democratized, US capacity to dictate UN policy waned, with the US soon becoming the world leader in UN vetoes. (154)

In South Korea, tens of thousands of guerrillas who had originated in peoples committees in the South fought the Americans and the ROK (Republic of Korea), the Southern dictatorship set up by the US. Before hot war broke out, the ROK military over mere weeks summarily executed some 100,000 to 1 million (74) (S. Brian Wilson puts the figure at 800,000) guerillas and peasant civilians, many of whom the dictatorship lured into camps with the promise of food. This was done with US knowledge and sometimes under direct US supervision, according to historian Kim Dong-choon and others (see Wilson above for more sources). The orders for the executions undoubtedly came from the top, which was dictator Syngman Rhee, the US-installed puppet, and the US itself, which controlled South Koreas military.After the war, the US helped try to cover up these executions, an effort that largely succeeded until the 1990s.

At a point in the war when the US was on the verge of defeat, General Douglas MacArthur

announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.

Truman rejected this idea and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950, which threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel, the line the US had arbitrarily drawn to artificially divide Korea, where there was overwhelming support for unification among the countrys population as a whole. The US then violated its own artificial border and pushed into the North.

China warned the US it would not sit by while the its neighbor was invaded (China itself also feared being invaded), but MacArthur shrugged this off, saying if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang he would slaughter them, adding, we are the best. MacArthur then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.

It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Koreas relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile. It was he who later said that the US ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age. Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too. Lemay was by no means exaggerating.

Lemay estimated the US killed off some 20% of the [North Korean] population.(For comparison, the highest percentage of population lost in World War II was in Poland, which lost approximately 16.93 to 17.22% of its people overall.) Dean Rusk, who later became a Secretary of State, said the US targeted and attempted to execute every person that moved in North Korea, and tried to knock over every brick standing on top of another.

Boggs gives many examples of mass atrocities, one taking place in 1950 when the US rounded up nearly 1,000 civilians who were then beaten, tortured, and shot to death by US troops, another in Pyongyang when the US summarily executed 3,000 people, mostly women and children, and another when the US executed some 6,000 civilians, many with machine guns, many by beheading them with sabers. He notes this list, just of the major atrocities, goes on endlessly. (75)

Above: US/UN forces in Korea in tanks painted to look like tigers.

When Chinese forces followed through on their threat and entered North Korea, successfully pushing back US troops, Truman then threatened China with nuclear weapons, saying they were under active consideration. For his part, MacArthur demanded the bombs As he put it in his memoirs:

I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombsstrung across the neck of Manchuriaand spread behind us from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.

Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.

He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.

In 1951 the U.S. initiated Operation Strangle, which officials estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million [mostly civilians and mostly resulting from US aerial bombardments in which civilians were deliberately targeted (54, 67-8), as were schools, hospitals, and churches (65). Estimates for the death toll also go much higher than 4 million (74)].

Boggs notes US propaganda during this time period (the US was a world leader in eugenics scholarship and race-based legal discrimination) dehumanized Asians and facilitated targeting and mass executions of inferior civilians: the US decision to target civilians was planned and systematic, going to the top of the power structure. no one was ever charged Some in the US forces, such as General Matthew Ridgeway, claimed the war was a Christian jihad in defense of God. (54-5) Analysts at George Washington University, looking at US contingency plans from this era to wipe out much of the worlds population with nuclear weapons, determined a likely rationale for the USs doctrine of targeting of civilians is to reduce the morale of the enemy civilian population through fear the definition of terrorism.

Atwood continues:

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true.

At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research [including non-consensual human experimentation] with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also [conducting non-consensual human experimentation on tens of thousands of people, including in gas chambers and aerial bombardments, with mustard gas and other chemical weapons,] experimenting with Sarin[later including non-consensual human experimentation], despite its ban by the Geneva Convention.

Boggs notes the US had substantial stocks of biological weapons and US leaders thought they might be able to keep their use secret enough to make a plausible denial. They also thought that if their use was uncovered, the US could simply remind its accusers that it had never signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol on biological warfare. (135-6)

A 1952 US government film made to instruct the US armed forces on the USs offensive biological and chemical warfare program says the US can deliver a biological or chemical attack hundreds of miles inland from any coastline to attack a large portion of an enemys population. The film shows US soldiers filling bio/chemical dispersal containers for contamination of enemy areas, and then a cartoon depiction of US bio/chem weapons agents being delivered from US ships, passing over Korea, and covering huge swathes of China.

Boggs notes

the US apparently hoped the rapid spread of deadly diseases would instill panic in Koreans and Chinese, resulting in a collapse of combat morale. (136)

Atwood adds that as in the case of the Rhee/US mass executions of South Koreans, Washington blamed the evident use of germ warfare on the communists.

The US also used napalm, a fiery gel that sticks to and burns through targets,

extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living a troglodyte existence. In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyangs harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded. Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.

At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.

Atwood concludes it is the collective memory of the above that animates North Koreas policies toward the US today.

Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.

Robert J. Barsocchini is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the US film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. He begins work on a Masters Degree in American Studies in the fall.

Source

Boggs, Carl. The Crimes of Empire. London; New York: Pluto; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

See the rest here:

Endless Atrocities: The US Role in Creating the North Korean Fortress-State - Center for Research on Globalization

RAVEN ROCK: The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die

By Garrett Graff. Simon & Schuster. 529 pp. $28

Garrett Graff says that his new book, Raven Rock, a detailed exploration of the United States doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of how nuclear war would have actually worked the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed ... as leaders realized the horrors ahead.

But if there is anything that Raven Rock proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place to ensure the survival of the presidency. And after Richard Nixons first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1,000 warheads national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the presidents dismay with his alternatives: If thats all there is, he wont do it.

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as a blur of acronyms and charts, minimizing the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook, and at times this book commits the same offense.

Its power, however, lies in the authors eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government, Graff writes. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on Sept. 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. Thats what deputies are for, the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

[Trumps new Russia expert wrote a psychological profile of Vladimir Putin and it should scare Trump]

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials. Apparently the wives of President Dwight Eisenhowers Cabinet members were less than pleased to learn that they had not made the list, even while their husbands secretaries had. And when an administration representative handed Earl Warren the ID card that would grant him access to a secure facility in an emergency, the chief justice replied, I dont see the pass for Mrs. Warren. Told that he was among the countrys 2,000 most important people, Warren handed the card back. Well, here, he said, youll have room for one more important official.

Perhaps the presence of the Supreme Court would prove inconvenient, anyway, because a post-nuclear America could easily become an executive branch dictatorship, Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the U.S. economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food. When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of prewritten, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime. And the Eisenhower-era Emergency Government Censorship Board, rechristened the Wartime Information Security Program under Nixon, was finally defunded after Watergate. However, as Graff notes, the executive orders all still remained drafted ready for an emergency when it arrived.

For all the ominous directives and war scenarios, there is something random and even comical about planning for Armageddon. How many Export-Import Bank staffers rate rescuing? How many from the Department of Agriculture? A Justice Department public affairs official was once even tasked with compiling a lineup of Washington journalists who should be saved. I remember painfully going over a list of people and wondering how do you balance a columnist I didnt think very much of as opposed to a reporter who I thought really did work, he said. And then, what should the chosen few take along? The congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, for instance, included a stash of bourbon and wine; staffers swore that the stockpile was to be used only to aid a hypothetical alcoholic congressman who might need to be weaned off.

Raven Rock revels in the expensive machinery and elaborate contingency formulas presidents had at their disposal to command the nuclear arsenal. High-tech ships known as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (nicknamed the Floating White House) were ready for use from 1962 into the Nixon years, while a string of EC-135 aircraft flights (code-named Looking Glass) began continuous shifts on Feb. 3, 1961, ensuring that one senior military leader with the proper authority would always be available to order a nuclear strike. Not breaking the chain of these overlapping flights became an U.S. military obsession, and it remained unbroken until the end of the Cold War.

Some efforts were low-tech, too: In 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order decreeing that the Postal Service would be responsible for delivering medical countermeasures to homes across America in case of biological attacks, because it had a unique capacity for rapid residential delivery. (Neither snow nor rain, nor germ warfare.)

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centers. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2,200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward U.S. targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five U.S. missiles heading toward the U.S.S.R. except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. The Soviet early warning system was a dangerous mess, Graff writes. Ours wasnt that great, either.

[How an American slacker caught a Russian spy at a New Jersey Hooters]

Over the decades, shifts in nuclear policy reflected presidents views on what was possible, technologically and strategically. Eisenhower planned for massive retaliation attacks, Kennedy relied on the notion of mutually assured destruction, and Carter imagined a drawn-out war, in which an initial nuclear exchange could produce weeks of inaction before follow-up strikes. Ronald Reagan issued a presidential directive suggesting for the first time that the United States should prevail in a nuclear war, even if the 1983 television movie The Day After later left him feeling greatly depressed, as he wrote in his diary.

For all the horrors it contemplates, Raven Rock proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defense as a priority, officials quickly realized how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes. Rather than remake the entire society, Graff writes, the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die.

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property.

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world.

Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest reviews, including:

Trumps national security adviser says hes ready to fight another world war

How Clinton and Obama tried to run the world while trying to manage each other

How to anticipate unthinkable terrorist attacks? Hire oddballs to think of them.

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How US presidents prepare for the end of the world - Washington Post

April 26, 2017 Updated 4/26/2017

Getty Images Roy Stormtroopers lined up in ranks. The Stormtroopers are action figures created by the Kotobukiya Toy company. Stormtroopers are enforcer characters from the Star Wars media franchise.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the SPE, I am changing things up this week. Usually, I look for emerging trends in the latest economic data and then offer a forecast about how these trends will affect the demand for plastics products over the next few quarters.

But for this column, I am casting my gaze farther into the future, and I will offer a few predictions about the prevalent business conditions 75 years from now and how the plastics industry will benefit from these conditions.

In other words, I am setting aside my finely tuned spreadsheets, graphs and computer models, and I am breaking out my crystal ball.

Over the next 75 years, the military industrial complex will become the largest end market for plastics parts and materials. Ever since the Stone Age ended, a kingdom's (or nation's) military might was commensurate with its ability to acquire or produce weapons and armor that were primarily made from metal. The need to remain a dominant military power will not change in the future, but the weapons upon which our nation will rely to maintain superiority will change. The Armor Age is over; the Plastics Age is underway.

In the future, weapons will increasingly be made of plastic. You may recall that in the movie "Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones," the clones (and the Stormtroopers) were built using a lot of molded plastics parts. You just can't build and ship that many clones unless your supply chain includes a number of state-of-the-art plastics processors and toolmakers.

The U.S. military is already making extensive use of unmanned aerial drones manufactured with a lot of composite materials, and I have no doubt that the use of unmanned weapons will soon extend to both land- and ocean-based weapons. Unmanned weapons are lighter, faster and less expensive to build and operate. They also result in fewer American casualties. Drones (and clones) built from plastic parts and circuit boards do not need armor to protect vulnerable flesh and blood.

I expect that the U.S. Navy will soon have unmanned craft and the Army will rapidly increase their use of land-based robots. These weapons will not be large like the Death Star, but rather very small. Think of a swarm of terror, or a cloud of death. Big and heavy is out; small, fast, expendable and easily replaced is the new dominant strategy.

This use of robots and drones will greatly diminish the need for boots on the ground, but not eliminate it completely. The soldiers of the future will be equipped with plastic suits and helmets that integrate computer technology in a way that greatly enhances performance and survivability. And many of the enhancements that improve the performance and safety of soldiers will be developed for large-scale commercial use by civilians.

While the armies of the future will increasingly be comprised of technologically advanced machines built from plastic parts and computer chips, the wars of the future may well be fought over the most fundamental building block of life water.

Up until now, our species has posted a long record of abusing, neglecting and otherwise undervaluing water as a most precious commodity. We have externalized the true costs of the way we use water, and we have left it to future generations to pay these costs. But in the words of the late economist Herbert Stein, "Trends that can't last forever, won't."

At some point in the next 75 years, the market will be forced to account for the true value of water, and this will be an enormous boon to the manufacturers of plastic pipe as well as the manufacturers of extrusion dies and machinery. The debacle in Flint, Mich., will be seen as just a drop in the ocean (pun intended). Water will eventually be collected, processed and distributed with all of the fervor and precision of craft beer or artisanal coffee. And all of this will only be possible by a previously unfathomable (again, intentional) investment in the infrastructure of the water industrial complex.

Be it due to chemical warfare, germ warfare, nuclear accident or just the random mutation of some lethal virus, the growth in demand for plastic hazmat suits and other types of basic plastic medical supplies will be closely correlated, and will eventually exceed, growth in the world's population.

And since I expect the population to expand at a steady rate for the next 75 years or so, this is good news for the plastics industry.

Most of the focus in the plastics industry press in recent years has been on all of the technological breakthroughs in the medical device sector. Without a doubt, the progress is impressive, and I predict this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. These breakthroughs generate their own demand, so demand is growing faster than the sluggish rate of population growth in the industrialized world. This means that the political will to invest huge sums of capital in new medical technologies will persist in the near-term because it's the older generation that shows up to vote in these countries.

But despite all of the amazing advances in technology, I still expect that most of the baby boomers will be dead in 75 years. (It is the millennials that will live forever.) Meanwhile, the populations of the world's developing countries, where the weather and social conditions are perfect for the evolution of deadly viruses and bacteria, will have grown substantially.

The net result of these demographic trends will be a significant shift in the type of medical equipment and supplies that are in global demand. The focus of the medical supply industrial complex will change from the low-volume, high-margin types of high-tech devices that currently get all of the attention to high-volume types of plastics health care products like hazmat suits and basic medical supplies. A plastic suit will be considered a basic necessity as a layer of defense against nature's pending swarms of terrible insects or man's clouds of deadly pollution or radiation.

The recycling rate of used plastics consumer products will rise from the current levels of less than 20 percent to well over 99 percent in the next 75 years. This is because the market value will finally catch up to the perceived value of both new and used plastics materials. In the not-too-distant future, market pressures will force producers and consumers alike to realize the egregious waste and high disposal costs that are created by using a plastic product once and then burning it or burying it.

At the present time, Americans are often accused of being too materialistic. But this is not really true. A real materialistic culture would place a proper value on materials that still have real value, like many types used plastics products.

But when there is money to be made, we are quick learners and rapid adapters. When looked at from a long-term perspective, sustainability is really just another word for efficiency. And that is something that the high-powered recycled materials industrial complex of the future will get behind in a big way, both politically and economically.

Economics is often referred to as the dismal science because most economics forecasts, when taken out far enough into the future, offer only bleak outcomes. But if we have any hope of forestalling, or even avoiding, a dismal ending to life as we know it, then plastics products will have to play a prominent role. Here's wishing the SPE another 75 years of rising prosperity.

Read more:

Plastics will be part of solutions in the future - Plastics News

We are fighting in Korea so we wont have to fight in Wichita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or in San Francisco Bay. President Harry S Truman, 1952

Why has this tiny nation of 24 million people invested so much of its limited resources in acquiring nuclear weapons? North Korea is universally condemned as a bizarre and failed state, its nuclear posture denounced as irrational.

Yet North Koreas stance cannot be separated out from its turbulent history during the 20th Century, especially its four decade long occupation by Japan, the forced division of the Korean peninsula after World War II, and, of course, the subsequent utterly devastating war with the United States from 1950-1953 that ended in an armistice in which a technical state of war still exists.

Korea is an ancient nation and culture, achieving national unity in 608 CE, and despite its near envelopment by gigantic China it has retained its own unique language and traditions throughout its recorded history. National independence came to an end in 1910 after five years of war when Japan, taking advantage of Chinese weakness, invaded and occupied Korea using impressed labor for the industries Japan created for the benefit of its own economy. As always the case for colonization the Japanese easily found collaborators among the Korean elite Koreans to manage their first colony.

Naturally a nationalist resistance movement emerged rapidly and, given the history of the early 20th Century, it was not long before communists began to play a significant role in Koreas effort to regain its independence. The primary form of resistance came in the form of peoples committees which became deeply rooted throughout the entire peninsula, pointedly in the south as well. It was from these deeply political and nationalistic village and city committees that guerrilla groups engaged the Japanese throughout WWII. The parallels with similar organizations in Vietnam against the Japanese, and later against the French and Americans, are obvious. Another analogous similarity is that Franklin Roosevelt also wanted a Great Power trusteeship for Korea, as for Vietnam. Needless to say both Britain and France objected to this plan.

Photo by Stefan Krasowski | CC BY 2.0

When Russia entered the war against Japanese in August of 1945 the end of Japanese rule was at hand regardless of the atomic bomb. As events turned out Japan surrendered on 15 August when Soviet troops had occupied much of the northern peninsula. It should be noted that American forces played no role in the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. However, because the Soviets, as allies of the U.S., wished to remain on friendly terms they agreed to the division of Korea between Soviet and American forces. The young Dean Rusk, later to become Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, arbitrarily drew a line of division across the 38th Parallel because, as he said, that would leave the capital city, Seoul, in the American zone.

Written reports at the time criticized Washington for allowing the Red Army into Korea but the fact was it was the other way around. The Soviets could easily have occupied the entirety of Korea but chose not to do so, instead opting for a negotiated settlement with the U.S. over the future of Korea. Theoretically the peninsula would be reunited after some agreement between the two victors at some future date.

However, the U.S. immediately began to favor those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese in the exploitation of their own country and its people, largely the landed elites, and Washington began to arm the provisional government it set up to root out the peoples committees. For their part the Soviets supported the communist nationalist leader, Kim Il-Sung who had led the guerrilla army against Japan at great cost in lives.

In 1947 the United Nations authorized elections in Korea, but the election monitors were all American allies so the Soviets and communist Koreans refused to participate. By then the Cold War was in full swing, the critical alliance between Washington and Moscow that had defeated Nazi Germany had already been sundered. As would later also occur in Vietnam in 1956, the U.S. oversaw elections only in the south of Korea and only those candidates approved by Washington. Syngman Rhee became South Koreas first president protected by the new American armed and trained Army of the Republic of Korea. This ROK was commanded by officers who had served the Japanese occupation including one who had been decorated by Emperor Hirohito himself and who had tried to track down and kill Kim Il Sung for the Japanese.

With Korea thus seemingly divided permanently both Russian and American troops withdrew in 1948 though they left advisers behind. On both sides of the new artificial border pressures mounted for a forcible reunification. The fact remained that much of rural southern Korea was still loyal to the peoples committees. This did not necessarily mean that they were committed communists but they were virulent nationalists who recognized the role that Kims forces had played against the Japanese. Rhees forces then began to systematically root out Kims supporters. Meanwhile the American advisers had constantly to keep Rhees forces from crossing the border to invade the north.

In 1948 guerrilla war broke out against the Rhee regime on the southern island of Cheju, the population of which ultimately rose in wholesale revolt. The suppression of the rebellion was guided by many American agents soon to become part of the Central Intelligence Agency and by military advisers. Eventually the entire population was removed to the coast and kept in guarded compounds and between 20,000 and 30,000 villagers died. Simultaneously elements of the ROK army refused to participate in this war against their own people and this mutiny was brutally suppressed by those ROK soldiers who would obey such orders. Over one thousand of the mutineers escaped to join Kims guerrillas in the mountains.

Though Washington claimed that these rebellions were fomented by the communists no evidence surfaced that the Soviets provided anything other than moral support. Most of the rebels captured or killed had Japanese or American weapons.

In North Korea the political system had evolved in response to decades of foreign occupation and war. Though it was always assumed to be a Soviet satellite, North Korea more nearly bears comparison to Titos Yugoslavia. The North Koreans were always able to balance the tensions between the Soviets and the Chinese to their own advantage. During the period when the Comintern exercised most influence over national communist parties not a single Korean communist served in any capacity and the number of Soviet advisers in the north was never high.

Nineteen forty-nine marked a watershed year. The Chinese Communist Revolution, the Soviet Atomic Bomb, the massive reorganization of the National Security State in the U.S. all occurred that year. In 1950 Washington issued its famous National Security Paper-68 (NSC-68) which outlined the agenda for a global anti-communist campaign, requiring the tripling of the American defense budget. Congress balked at this all-encompassing blueprint when in the deathless words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson Thank God! Korea came along. Only months before Acheson had made a speech in which he pointedly omitted Korea from Americas Defense perimeter.

The Korean War seemed to vindicate everything written and said about the international communist conspiracy. In popular myth on June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact the entire 38th Parallel had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949. On numerous occasions Syngman Rhee had to be restrained by American advisers from invading the north. The Korean civil war was all but inevitable. Given postwar American plans for access globally to resources, markets and cheaper labor power any form of national liberation, communist or liberal democratic, was to be opposed. Acheson and his second, Dean Rusk, told President Truman that we must draw the line here! Truman decided to request authorization for American intervention from the United Nations and bypassed Congress thereby leading to widespread opposition and, later, a return to Republican rule under Dwight Eisenhower..

Among the remaining mysteries of the UN decision to undertake the American led military effort to reject North Korea from the south was the USSRs failure to make use of its veto in the Security Council. The Soviet ambassador was ostensibly boycotting the meetings in protest of the UNs refusal to seat the Chinese communists as Chinas official delegation. According to Bruce Cumings though, evidence exists that Stalin ordered the Soviet ambassador to abstain. Why? The UN resolution authorizing war could have been prevented. At that moment the Sino-Soviet split was already in evidence and Stalin may have wished to weaken China, something which actually happened as a result of that nations subsequent entry into the war. Or he may have wished that cloaking the UN mission under the U.S. flag would have revealed the UN to be largely under the control of the United States, which indeed it was. What is known is that Stalin refused to allow Soviet combat troops and reduced shipments of arms to Kims forces. Later, however Soviet pilots would engage Americans in the air. The Chinese were quick to condemn the UN action as American imperialism and warned of dire consequences if China itself were threatened.

The war went badly at first for the U.S. despite numerical advantages in forces. Rout after rout followed with the ROK in full retreat. Meanwhile tens of thousands of southern guerrillas who had originated in peoples committees fought the Americans and the ROK. At one point the North Koreans were in control of Seoul and seemed about to drive American forces into the sea. At that point the commander- in-chief of all UN forces, General Douglas MacArthur, announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.

Truman was loathe to introduce nukes and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950 with few losses by the Marine Corps vaunted 1st Division. This threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel, the mandate imposed by the UN resolution. But the State Department claimed that the border was not recognized under international law and therefore the UN mandate had no real legal bearing. It was this that MacArthur claimed gave him the right to take the war into the north. Though the North Koreans had suffered a resounding defeat in the south, they withdrew into northern mountain redoubts forcing the American forces that followed them into bloody and costly combat, led Americans into a trap.

The Chinese had said from the beginning that any approach of foreign troops toward their border would result in dire consequences. Fearing an invasion of Manchuria to crush the nascent communist revolution the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai declared that China

will not supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors invaded by the imperialists.

MacArthur sneered at this warning.

They have no airforceif the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great slaughterwe are the best.

He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.

It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Koreas relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was

about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.

It was he who later said that the US ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age. Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said

We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.

Lemay was by no means exaggerating.

On November 27, 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly crossed the border into North Korea completely overwhelming US forces. Acheson said this was the worst defeat of American forces since Bull Run. One famous incident was the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where 50,000 US marines were surrounded. As they escaped their enclosure they said they were advancing to the rear but in fact all American forces were being routed.

Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was under active consideration. MacArthur demanded the bombs As he put it in his memoirs:

I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombsstrung across the neck of Manchuriaand spread behind us from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.

Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.

He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.

It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for publically announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under MacArthurs command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a preemptive strike against China anyway.

By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the communists had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel. Chinese ground forces might have been able to push the entire UN force off the peninsula entirely but that would not have negated US naval and air forces, and would have probably resulted in nuclear strikes against the Chinese mainland and that brought the real risk of Soviet entry and all out nuclear exchanges. So from this point on the war became one of attrition, much like the trench warfare of World War I. casualties continued to be high on both sides for the duration of the war which lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was signed.

Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the U.S. initiated Operation Strangle which officialls estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese died either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.

Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living a troglodyte existence.In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyangs harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that

Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.

Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.

At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.

So after a horrific war Korea returned to the status quo ante bellum in terms of political boundaries but it was completely devastated, especially the north.

I submit that it is the collective memory of all of what Ive described that animates North Koreas policies toward the US today which has nuclear weapons on constant alert and stations almost 30,000 forces at the ready. Remember, a state of war still exists and has since 1953.

While South Korea received heavy American investment in the industries fleeing the United States in search of cheaper labor and new markets it was nevertheless ruled until quite recently by military dictatorships scarcely different than those of the north. For its part the north constructed its economy along five-year plans and collectivized its agriculture. While it never enjoyed the sort of consumer society that now characterizes some of South Korea, its GDP grew substantially until the collapse of communism globally brought about the withdrawal of all foreign aid to north Korea.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as some American policymakers took note of the norths growing weakness Secretary of Defense Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz talked openly of using force finally to settle the question of Korean reunification and the claimed threat to international peace posed by North Korea.

In 1993 the Clinton Administration discovered that North Korea was constructing a nuclear processing plant and also developing medium range missiles. The Pentagon desired to destroy these facilities but that would mean wholesale war so the administration fostered an agreement whereby North Korea would stand down in return for the provision of oil and other economic aid. When in 2001, after the events of 9-11, the Bush II neo-conservatives militarized policy and declared North Korea to be an element of the axis of evil. All bets were now off. In that context North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reasoning that nuclear weapons were the only way possible to prevent a full scale attack by the US in the future. Given a stark choice between another war with the US and all that would entail this decision seems hardly surprising. Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect, after all the history Ive described, that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.

(Acknowledgement to Bruce Cumings and I.F. Stone)

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