White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Remembering a Generation Defined by Duty

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Seventy years ago, we celebrated the end of World War II in Europe. That celebration is not the first memory of my childhood, but it is one of the clearest.

I was a five-year-old boy in Cape Town, South Africa, proudly displaying a paper Union Jack, the familiar British flag, and watching the victory parade. I often wonder where the flags came from – before offset printing and photocopying – in time for the parade. Someone knew victory was at hand.

There was a palpable, universal happiness – though more subdued, I am told, than the outbursts which greeted the end of World War I. For me, that was the best parade ever. It was wonderful to see people grabbing each other, doing little impulsive jigs in the street.

Marching in the parade was the handsomest man I had ever seen, or have seen since: my father in his best Royal South African Navy uniform of a chief petty officer, engine room. My father was a wonderful man in many ways. He was not lettered, but extremely kind and dutiful, and loved for those things — not for being handsome. But I tell you, that day he was handsome.

It was not until 1998 that Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation,” in a book of that name. Maybe all who go to war are the greatest generation. Maybe, every father who survives is unbearably handsome to someone.

Memorial Day is upon us and our veterans — maybe veterans everywhere — will be briefly remembered. The Greatest Generation was, perhaps, the last time a generation was defined by its sense of duty. That was true of the men and women who peopled my young life.

My father sold our home and few possessions, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to serve. He was turned down for the British army in Rhodesia because an arm he had once broken had not mended properly. He had heard that the Royal South African Navy would be more tolerant. His acceptance by the navy was not a certainty, and we had no money. But we made the long, hot, six-day journey to South Africa by train to no known future; my father, mother, brother and myself, all going off to war because that is what was done. That is what the men of the Greatest Generation did because it was your duty to serve.

My father was not alone. I grew up hearing other stories of how people had gone to great lengths to serve and, having gotten into the armed services, how they did everything they could to get into the fight, not to serve at a distance in a British dominion, as South Africa then was. That is how South African pilots came to serve in the Battle of Britain.

In those days, patriotism was organic here in the United States and around the globe. Not every last man of military age was a patriot, but most were. It was the deep-seated culture.

When it was over, those who survived WWII were welcomed home with celebrations, appreciation and reverence. Alas the warriors from more recent wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and lesser conflicts, have come home to cold comfort. No parades, no five-year-olds with flags — and little place in the tapestry of the national memory. No recognition of their inalienable right to honor.

War is not everyone’s business anymore. Vietnam was the first war where patriotism was not part of the equation. Today, with a professional military, it is not the business of the armchair patriots with their slogans, urging others to take up arms.

When the World War II Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington in April 2004, I went there. I did not like it, architecturally; I was disappointed. But then men with canes and in wheelchairs began arriving, smiling and shedding occasional tears. It was important and moving to them, those handsome men. My father would have loved it; now, I like it well. Memorial Day weekend is at hand.

Happy Birthday, America; Take That, Europe!

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Happy birthday, America—really happy birthday.

 

As an immigrant, I can say that with an authenticity and sincerity I would not have if I had been born on this blessed piece of real estate with its spirit of possibility. I came here because I am of the last generation that was, perhaps globally, pro-American.

 

Yes, after World War II, the United States was admired the world over. I grew up in Africa where American education, American technology and American goods–from cars to radios–were venerated.

 

When Coca-Cola was introduced into Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), there was practically a national holiday. The company’s employees–with the blessing of the authorities and government departments—flooded the schools with vending machines. This was not because local soft drinks were not refreshing. No, it was a kind of homage to the United States: We wanted a sip of the American magic. As a colony, we wanted less of London and more of New York. We believed Americans were invincible. In our eyes Americans were superior because they had smarter government, better laws and more entrepreneurial people.

 

Of course, in that faraway place, we idealized all things American and sometimes we were wishfully wrong. For example, we believed that the United States had solved its race problems (hardly in the 1950s) and that the more we followed America and broke with our mother country, Britain, the better. It was the American example that led Prime Minister Ian Smith to unilaterally–and disastrously, as it turned out–declare independence from Britain on Nov. 11, 1965.

 

In 1959, I moved to Britain where there was a much greater sense of competition across the Atlantic, more resentment of America climbing as Britain was sinking. Also, there was resentment of America’s abandonment of the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. It was a period of adjustment.

 

It was also a wrenching time in European intellectual life. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, both followed by brutal Soviet repression, undermined European intellectuals’ faith in communism; but they did not switch to untrammeled support of capitalism. Wary of the politics of the right, they were looking for kindness, gentleness and an indigenous way forward.

 

Europeans wanted a future that would allow for their historical experiences, but would not sweep them into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union or the United States. That way forward was democratic socialism, embraced by all European political parties except the extreme nationalistic ones of the right and the communists, who are still found on the extreme left in France, Italy and other countries.

 

As Europe moved into its democratic socialist future, anti-Americanism grew. It was based on economic resentment, fear of U.S. foreign policy and anger over the difficulty of penetrating the U.S. market. Appreciation of American sacrifice in World War II was laced with resentment that America did not join the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Some blame for anti-Americanism lies with the European newspapers of the time. They seized on crime; the oddities of American life (like the shoe-shaped house); the size of American automobiles; and, of course, the cavorting of Hollywood stars. While American media portrayed Europe as Disneyland for grownups, Europeans were led to believe that American life was brutal and freakish.

 

Serious chroniclers like Alastair Cooke–an Englishman who dedicated a good part of his life telling Britain, on the BBC and in The Manchester Guardian, that America was a wondrous place–failed to arrest the rising tide of anti-Americanism.

 

That had to come later, after the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. None of our carping European friends could pull off such an historical first in their own countries.

 

No matter what you think of the man, Obama’s election as the first African-American president is a very American triumph. The world has applauded the system that could produce this result and the people who made it possible. Only in America. Happy birthday.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shut Up and Think of Something

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In early 1943, Britain’s Bomber Command had been wrestling with the thorny problem of how to breach two critical dams in the Ruhr valley, cutting electricity production and incapacitating industrial production. Taking them out was a high priority of the war cabinet and Bomber Command.

 

But the problems were daunting. The dams, the Eder and the Mohne, were heavily protected with anti-aircraft batteries, and bombing at the time lacked precision. Bomber Command knew that it had to deliver its explosives to the lower part of the dam walls, if they were to be breached.

 

The solution came from a scientist and engineer, Barnes Wallis, who watched children skipping stones on water: Drop the bombs well away from the dam walls and have them bounce to the wall, sink and explode. Simple technology to the rescue.

 

The bombs would be circular and would be rotated so they hit the water, spinning backward but with overall forward motion. Like a stone skimmed along the surface of a pond they would travel to the wall, sink and detonate at the foot of the dam.

 

The scheme was fiendishly clever and extremely dangerous. It was conceived in January 1943 and executed on May 17, 1943.

 

To avoid detection, waves of bombers flew across Holland into Germany, maintaining an altitude of 100 feet and making their runs at 60 feet above the water. Many aircraft and their crews were lost, but the Eder and Mohne were breached, wrecking havoc in the Ruhr Valley.

 

There is a lesson here in how to deal with nuclear proliferation: Call off the politicians and the commentators and send in the scientists and engineers.

 

With Iran and North Korea, the West is not only suffering huge frustration but its impotence is revealed, tempting every other aspiring nuclear power to forge ahead. Neither of the options on the table is any good at all. Sanctions don’t work and reigniting war on the Korean Peninsula by bombing North Korean nuclear installations is unpalatable. As should be further destabilizing the Middle East by bombing Iran, thus consolidating hatred of the West and pushing oil above $200-a-barrel.

 

So forget about bombing and sanctions. Bombing, even if it were to dent the nuclear development in the countries concerned, is clumsy, wrought with unintended consequences and calculated to produce years, if not centuries, of resentment.

 

Yet morally, those who are in the nuclear club are obliged to keep their awful institution small. Preemptive action is reasonable but it needs to be stealthy and, ideally, anonymous. In this case, the moral weight is on the side of intervention.

 

There are many ways of enriching uranium, which involves concentrating the fissionable isotope, uranium 235, by stripping away the dominant isotope, uranium 238. The preferred way is using gas centrifuges, which is the way Iran has chosen, To understand the technology, think of a cream churn: Rather than being filled with milk these vessels are filled with a gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spun at 1,500 revolutions a second in batteries of hundreds of centrifuges.

 

These machines have two important vulnerabilities: They are so highly engineered that supposedly a fingerprint can throw them off and initiate failure, and they consume a lot of electricity.

 

Electric systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack, if they are computer- controlled (almost certainly the case in Iran and probably not in North Korea). Iran, which is apparently working toward a highly enriched uranium weapon, is vulnerable through its centrifuges–a cyber-attack on its electricity supply, causing wild functions in voltage, could be damaging, as could harmonic resonance and vibration, if these can be delivered secretly.

 

North Korea is more problematic because they already have a weapon and it is unclear whether they stuck with their original plan to use plutonium from a Soviet-era reactor or whether, as they said, they switched to uranium enrichment. These are the two paths to making a weapon: plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

 

With North Korea–so paranoid and insecure–their vulnerability is with their delivery rockets. The West’s imperative: find a way of messing with their guidance systems. If surreptitiously their rockets could be destroyed early in flight, or redirected back towards their launch pads, the Pyongyang military might rethink their whole program.

 

Bombs skittering across the surface of German dams in 1943 point to the potency of technological solutions–and a third way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Send in the Cyber-Battalions

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Thirty years ago, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on nuclear proliferation. Like many people asked to testify, I was blindsided by the honor of the thing; and when I came to write my testimony, like others before and since, I was limited to a litany of the woes of proliferation. There were no good answers. Now, there are technological possibilities for intruding into a proliferator’s workplace.

 

I did emphasize to the Senate the difficult moral argument involved: I told the senators that our posture was to ask the world’s lesser countries to trust us because we did not trust them. A ticklish point that–made all the more so by the inevitable appeal of a nuclear arsenal to non-entity countries.

 

But when it comes to proliferation, the nuclear club has a larger obligation: to keep itself small.

 

Every new proliferator is a threat to the world, and most likely a threat to itself. The fact is that a primitive nuclear weapon is a danger to its makers as well as to the world at large.

 

Throughout the Cold War, the United States handed safety technology to the Soviet Union, including failsafe switching and insensitive TNT. Both sides realized that an accidental detonation could lead to a hostile exchange in the confusion. It would have been world annihilation by mistake.

 

So dangerous were the earliest U.S. nuclear weapons that Fat Man and Little Boy were assembled on their flights to Japan. One has to wonder, and to worry, about the safety of North Korea’s bombs and even of Pakistan’s.

 

Thirty years ago, there was no answer to proliferation except hand-wringing and sanctions, which historically have not worked. The Iranian sanctions have been broken by Russia, China and many European countries; and the North Korean sanctions have been broken by China, which provides food and fuel to control the flood of refugees from North Korea into China.

 

So the stealthy technological option becomes imperative.

 

That possibility involves a secret, anonymous attack on the proliferator that can be confused with an earthquake or with the failure guidance systems of the proliferator’s rockets. These would appear to be design malfunctions not secret attacks. Particularly with North Korea, rocket failure will undermine its fragile sense of worth, and cause the military to think it is very vulnerable.

 

It is believed that North Korea set out to build a plutonium weapon from plutonium bred in a Russian-supplied research reactor. But North Korea apparently switched from a planned plutonium weapon to a highly enriched uranium weapon. If so, good. It is easier to disrupt uranium enrichment than the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium.

 

This is also our advantage with Iran. There are many ways to enrich uranium, but three stand out: gaseous diffusion of the kind used by the United States during World War II, gas centrifuges, and the South African nozzle method. All have the same objective: to separate and concentrate uranium 235 from the more plentiful uranium 238.

 

Gas centrifuge is the most favored. It is what the Iranians are pursuing, and probably what the North Koreans are using. It is efficient, but it requires incredible engineering.

 

Think of a centrifuge as a great cream churn, except this one spins at 1,500

revolutions per second. One report says that a centrifuge can fail as a result of the imbalance produced by a single fingerprint. In order to stop a proliferator using enriched uranium, you would need either to create a huge vibration that would cause the centrifuges to fly apart or cut the electricity supply.

 

The electricity option is tempting. It is difficult to conceal a power plant and easier to disrupt its output if it is computer-controlled, as most are. If North Korea’s plants are so primitive that they are not vulnerable through computers, other vulnerabilities need exploiting.

 

Some commentators have called for war against North Korea and for the Israelis to bomb the Iranian installations. The former would bring all-out war back to the Korean Peninsula and the latter would unite the Arabs with the Iranians, incite war and starve the world of oil.

 

A better way is to surreptitiously throw science at the miscreants, disrupt the flow of electricity in Iran and the flight of rockets in North Korea.

 

Thirty years ago, we were babes in the woods about arresting nuclear proliferation. Today, we can look to the countermeasures of stealthy cyber-invasion. No bombs, please. Send in the electrons.


 

Needed: A New Approach to Nuclear Proliferation

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The trouble with the diplomatic argument against nuclear proliferation is that it is patronizing. Simplified, it is the nuclear weapons state saying to any nuclear aspirant, “Trust us, because we do not trust you.” This unpleasant message is often amplified by race and religion. After all, the primary force in containing proliferation is the United States, backed up by its western European allies. Sure there are blandishments that can tip the scale, as happened with Libya. But by and large, proliferation is a national goal for many countries.

The surprising thing about proliferation is how slowly it has spread. For awhile, it even looked as though it was in retreat, when Argentina, Brazil and South Africa quit the race.

To understand the pressure to proliferate, we need to look at each potential proliferator and its aspirations separately.

Small countries, with a high respect for their history and a deep commitment to the well-being of their people, tend to eschew proliferation. Britain got into the club very early, but it is not likely that any British government in recent time would have elected for Britain to seek the nuclear deterrent. At times, it was hard enough to keep it. Bertrand Russell´s Committee for Nuclear Disarmament was a powerful force in British politics throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Proliferators generally need a large land mass for concealment and testing, a defined sense of threat from outsiders, and a desire for regional dominance. Classically, Iran meets these criteria. North Korea´s motivation is more bizarre, but so is its leadership. It already has conventional weapons superiority over South Korea, but it cannot hope to be a dominant player in Asia.

Security alarmists constantly pose the proposition that a non-governmental organization, like al-Qaeda, could build a weapon in secret and introduce it into the Middle East, Europe or the United States. This is the worst of all scenarios, but it is also the least likely. Building a nuclear weapon is a huge industrial undertaking, requiring secrecy, specialized materials, skilled scientists and engineers, and an open money spigot.

True, it has gotten a little easier since it has become clear that plutonium from civilian nuclear reactors can be diverted to weapons. It is also clear that centrifuge now offers the potential for a highly enriched uranium bomb–something that was not really available with the World War II enrichment technology.

The bad news on nuclear proliferation and the intractable problems of proliferation by Iran and North Korea have come at a time when the world clearly needs an enormous increase in the amounts of civilian nuclear power deployed. Countries that have been reluctant to build new nuclear power plants are going ahead. In Europe, this has been stimulated by the growing fear of dependence on fossil fuels from Russia. In many countries, this is heading towards 50 percent of their electric generation; and when the new Baltic pipeline starts deliveries into Germany, it could be as much as 70 percent dependent on Russian gas. Super-green Finland is building a fifth reactor. And the green-leaning Labor government in Britain has sanctioned more nuclear.

In Europe, new reactors raise few hackles on the proliferation front. But what to say about King Abdullah of Jordan’s desire to build a nuclear plant? He is a firm friend of the West and a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. The question is how long will his monarchy survive? It was the United States that urged a nuclear future in Iran, and reactor construction was happily under way when the Shah was deposed by the Islamic Revolution.

Diplomacy works in 10-year cycles or less. Nuclear reactors are designed to last 30 to 50 years. Neither friends nor foes can be identified over that time horizon. Ergo, a new proliferation strategy may be needed.

The United States had the makings of a strategy before Jimmy Carter was elected president. Simply, it was that the United States would dominate all facets of the nuclear fuel cycle and encourage nuclear club members to do the same thing. When Carter suspended the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the United States, the possibility of controlling the fuel cycle for “clients” ended.

Subsequently the policy has been diplomatic persuasion, followed by sanctions, followed by a plea for multinational talks. It may or may not be working with North Korea; and so far it has produced no results with Iran.

In the Cold War, the United States assisted the Soviets with making their weapons safer by sharing aspects of fail-safe technology and giving them the technology for insensitive high explosives. The fear was accidental detonation, and the collaboration on preventing it was impressive.

Primitive nuclear weapons are dangerous; so much so that Little Boy and Fat Man, dropped on Japan, were partially assembled on the aircraft that was delivering them. Their designers were terrified that they would blow up unintentionally.

In a world in which there are more dangerous weapons in the hands of more dangerous people, there is not much hope that ambitious states can be deterred. But by working with them on safety, the old-time nuclear states, led by the United States, might establish new diplomatic channels and get a better idea of what they have got. Candidate One for safety collaboration might be Pakistan.