Boo! Again.

I found an article in The Atlantic online about one last "low-grade game of nuclear blackmail" by the Libyan government in 2009. The idea was that the last of Libya's nuclear materials was supposed to be flown out of the country to Russia, but at the last minute, the Libyans refused to allow it to leave the country.

[Libya] left the seven five-ton casks [of highly enriched uranium] out in the open and under light guard, vulnerable to theft by the al-Qaeda factions that still operate in the region or by any rogue government that learned of their presence.

Later in the article, the author notes:

It would have been easy for anyone with a gun and a truck to drive up, overpower the guard, use the crane to load the casks onto the truck, and drive off into the vast Libyan desert.

Makes sense so far. Next up is a description of Libya's demands. After this we're told:

The Russian engineers busied themselves with finding a way to secure the uranium, something that required them to "develop entirely new technology" on the fly, as a U.S. official wrote. Faced with an unprecedented problem--nuclear material abandoned in temporary casks that could not be moved --they set out to improvise a solution. The uranium had to be removed from the casks but was far too radioactive to be handled by humans. The engineers settled on a remote-controlled device that they hoped could safely extract the uranium and move it to the Tajoura facility's built-in ponds, where it would be better contained. The so-called grapple would have been the first of its kind. They even planned to train Tajoura's Libyan engineers in the grapple's use. Department of Energy officials in Libya called it "an unprecedented operation."

Now I'm confused. The Russians have to "develop entirely new technology" to mount "an unprecedented operation" just to put material "far too radioactive to be handled by humans" back into the same facility it had just come out of, but all al-Qaeda has to do to steal it is drive up in a truck? Really? I'm not sure that I believe that for a moment. I get the idea that jihadis aren't terribly concerned with their own safety, but the point behind suicide bombing is to die when the bomb goes off - not while you're attempting to get the materials for it. The idea that al-Qaeda has the NBC-handling capacity to deal with highly radioactive materials seems to be something of a stretch.

This article seems like a scare piece, designed to remind us of why we still need to be hyper-vigilant about what people in other countries that don't look like us, and don't automatically take our word that we're "the good guys" at face value, are doing. The United States is the world's foremost military power. And Russia's no slouch, either. I find it difficult to believe that between the two nations, we couldn't have managed to scare up a hundred guys to keep an eye on that material, and make sure nothing happened to it. What really would the Libyans have done about it? Complained to the United Nations?

The article tells us that "Owing to the sensitive nature of nuclear counterproliferation, a number of technical details have been omitted from this account[...]." Some of those details seem to be important, as the story as written doesn't always square with itself. It's implied that the Libyans were counting on the United States thinking that terrorists might steal the material, in order to give them leverage - but how would they have done that if the "casks could not be moved?" Nothing is said about the Libyans demanding that the casks sit exactly where they were - and if they didn't want the material to move, it wouldn't have made any sense for the Russians to go through the effort of planning their "unprecedented operation," to take the material out of the casks. So the casks must have been effectively immobile for a reason other than Libyan insistence. Again, this leads back to the idea that this incident might not be all it's cracked up to be.

The month-long crisis, never revealed by the Obama administration or reported in the press, is recorded in U.S. State Department documents obtained by The Atlantic. Those documents tell the story of frantic diplomatic maneuvering as U.S. and Russian officials pushed Libyan leaders to honor their disarmament pledge. A person with access to the cables provided them to The Atlantic in order to publicize the dangers of loose nuclear materials under the control of unpredictable regimes in unstable countries.

Looks like there are still neocons in the administration, after all. And people in the press willing to do their dirty work for them.

A Matter of Trust

Videos, like this one featured in Megan McArdle's webblog, are problematic as evidence of anything. Because of the lack of sound, you don't really know what is going on - there's nothing that you can use to verify what the captions tell you is happening.

But in a lot of ways, that's completely beside the point. This video points to a bigger problem - the idea that Transportation Security Administration workers can quickly become tin-plated tyrants, willing to punish people for simply standing up for the rights and privileges that they are supposed to have. Even if you assume that this video is more a less a complete fabrication, and/or deliberately taken out of context by some rabble-rousing terrorist sympathizer, the fact that the media is taking it seriously, and wanting more information is indicative of the greater issue that we're having with our security apparatus.

Security works on trust. That's just the nature of the beast. So, the TSA, unsurprisingly says, "Trust us." But there are segments of the population that are wary of doing so for its own sake. They ask, "How do we know we can trust you?" The problem arises when the perceived answer is "I don't recall phrasing that as a request."

Misanthropy

Back when I was in college, a bunch of us would occasionally sit around and waste time on various incarnations of "what if?" It took many forms, but would sometimes actually be simply "What if this happened? What would you do?" Depending on who was present, the overall themes would vary; one day, it was very science-fiction laden and the following question was posed:

Aliens are attacking the Earth, and have made it clear that they plan to exterminate the whole of the human species. You have the ability to communicate with them. What would you do?

I was feeling somewhat cranky that evening, and so my answer was simply: "Ask if they're still accepting applications." It was good for a laugh.

The impulse to see the entire human race wiped out is, I think, what happens in those rare moments when one is, for better or (likely) worse, cynical enough to keep up. In a lot of ways, it's the dark side of serenity - resignation mixed with more than a little contempt. The difficult thing about it is that people feed it without knowing it - I'm sure that I've done more than my share of pushing people into wishing for the destruction of the species, even if I couldn't actually tell you about a single episode.

Being okay with who we are as individuals is work enough on its own - being okay with who we are as the entire mass of humanity usually requires living under one of the few rocks that still lacks cable and high-speed Internet access. (I heard a Buddhist remark that he's heartened by the fact the news is so dominated by the nasty things we do unto each other, as the fact that we considered them newsworthy meant that we considered them unusual. I gave him top marks for creativity.) But that, of course, is something of a cop-out. Which brings me back to the dark side of serenity. Understanding that there are things you can't change can bring wonderful peace of mind. But it can also become a convenient cover for apathy - or, perhaps more accurately, learned helplessness.

Setting out to change the world is, to be blunt, a fool's errand. But if dreams come true, then one might as well dream big. And it beats signing on with an alien armada.

Choices

"If you have two planes getting ready to depart and one, you say, everybody has been thoroughly screened on this plane, and you can either go on that plane or another plane where we have not done a thorough screening because people did not feel comfortable with that, I think most if not all of the traveling public will say, 'I want to go on that plane that has been thoroughly screened.' "
TSA Administrator John Pistole

I think I'll take the unscreened plane. If Pistole is wrong, I get to be on a plane full of people who don't go for the whole "security theater" thing. If he's right, I get a plane all to myself. Either way, however, I doubt it does much for my chances of being killed in a terrorist incident.

Lost In The Myth

Today is Thanksgiving Day, 2010. Back before the holiday became little more than the day of rest before the craziness that is the first official day of the Christmas shopping season, it was well, Thanksgiving. Original settlers from England held a feast to give thanks to God for the fact that they were still alive; it became a tradition, and eventually, it was made into a national holiday.

But despite the fact that there is a large part of the mythology of Thanksgiving devoted to the cooperation between the settlers and the Native Americans, and how the "Indians" were so instrumental in the survival of the colonists, it really seems to me that somewhere along the way, the natives have been forgotten. Of the six traditional continents that have nation-states on them, three of them have nations that come across as being by, for and of people who are native to the areas that they inhabit. North America is not one of them. The Native American population in the United States (I can't speak to Canada or Mexico, so I won't.) seems to be really marginal. Of all of the people that I've met that claim connection to the native population, all but one seemed to fall back on, in one way or another the One Drop Rule - they're 1/8th Cherokee or 3/64ths Blackfoot. Being some small amount Native American has become a mark of honor in some way - or a ticket to a slice of casino money; I'm not sure which. But these are people who don't live on reservations, out in the middle of nowhere on often marginal land, segregated from the mainstream of national society.

I don't know if I actually care more about the Native American population today than I did a week ago. Something tells me that I'm just fed up with the basic falsity of the mythology of the modern Thanksgiving holiday, and recalling the natives allows me to feel like less of an accessory after the fact.