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Forget Time magazine with its four alleged
Peacemakers
on the cover. Maybe they'll make peace
someday, but at the moment, South Africa and the Levant are
about as peaceful as Bosnia, Somalia or South Central L.A.
Time ought to consider accomplishments, rather than goals;
we all know what road is paved with good intentions.
instead, of the movers and shakers in this world, Hazel
O'Leary, U.S. secretary of energy, deserves to be Man of
the Year.
Since she began releasing acres of classified documents that detail our nuclear programs, we now know why it was so important for the U.S. to win the Cold War by any means necessary.
If we hadn't triumphed, then hundreds of bureaucrats would be on trial for crimes against humanity -- fiendish medical experiments worthy of the Third Reich, radiation exposure tests conducted on the unknowing, the deliberate poisoning of vast stretches of the American West.
The trial wouldn't even make for good television.
Defendant after defendant saying I was just following
orders
and It was in the interest of national
security,
ruling after ruling that under the Nuremburg
principle that America helped establish, humans are
responsible to a higher moral standard than the dictates of
a nation.
It would get boring, and soon cease to be educational; if this sort of spectacle worked, then the Nazi trials would have deterred our Cold War criminals, who began their violations even as the Nuremburg tribunal dominated every front page and newsreel.
Pleased as I am by O'Leary's unique government policy of letting us know what was done in our name and with our money, I figured there had to be more. I called my favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
So you're impressed with Hazel O'Leary's policy of
openness, of finally admitting that the main effect of the
American bomb program was to hurt Americans, rather than
our supposed enemies in Russia,
he summarized.
True enough, I agreed. But she works in Washington, where doing something just because it's the right thing to do is as rare as frugality or an understandable regulation. So there's got to be a hidden agenda.
Clever thinking,
Ziegler agreed. And you're
right. They're not doing this out of any sudden heart-felt
concern for the welfare of the American people. It's a
propaganda ploy.
This didn't strike me as anything you could spin in a way that would improve America's image abroad, so I pressed for details.
The big worry these days is proliferation. Keep Iraq
from developing a bomb. Monitor Iran to be sure it won't
build a bomb. Get Ukraine to dismantle its bombs. Go after
North Korea if it is building a bomb.
That's a big worry, I agreed. It's hard to trust those tinhorn despots to practice safe fusion.
Right. But suppose we informed the world of the true
costs of building and testing nuclear weapons -- the human
suffering, the toxic landscapes, the betrayal of your
national principles, the suborning of your best minds who
might otherwise have created something humane or useful.
Don't you think that would strip away the glamour?
Of course it would. And in today's electronic global village, every time Hazel O'Leary releases a pile of previously classified documents, it takes only minutes for the latest horrors to be known even in the remotest places.
That's why she didn't release everything at once,
Ziegler explained. This way, every couple of months,
there will be new developments. Within a year or two, every
policy-maker in the world is going to think 'Hey, if
America, with all its wealth and resources, couldn't run a
bomb program without trashing its own people and territory,
how could we?' And they'll soon shut down their
programs.
Another brilliant ploy by the Committee. I congratulated Ziegler for this clever way of discouraging nuclear proliferation.
It was either that, or a war-crimes trial,
he
confessed, so the choice was pretty simple.
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