The Mighty Saddam

We continue to hear warnings of the woes that may betide us if we depose Saddam. The funny thing is that they assume that he is actually capable of carrying this out.

After the Gulf War in 1991, analysts were criticized for predicting levels of resistance and casualties that didn’t come. But many say the situation would be different in a war today – in part because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be more desperate.

Yes, no matter how many times they’re proven wrong, the next situation is always “different.” But is it?

If the United States goes to war, it will be because Bush believes Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological weapons. It would follow that Saddam would use those weapons to fight back. Saddam doesn’t have missiles that could reach the United States.

But as he demonstrated in 1991 by firing 39 Scud missiles at Israel, he considers Israel a surrogate target. Those Scuds had only conventional warheads, and Washington managed to dissuade Israel from retaliating.

If the missiles carried chemical or biological warheads this time, and if they caused serious damage, Washington’s job would be much harder. Some say major casualties would force Israel to retaliate by firing a nuclear weapon at Baghdad.

“If Saddam was able to kill 50 Israelis – no. Five hundred – probably not. Fifty thousand – done deal,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent military policy think tank.

Note the subject of the sentence. It’s not “the Iraqi military,” or the “nation of Iraq.” It’s “he” has the missiles, and “Saddam” will kill Israelis.

The writer has personalized it to Saddam. It is written as though he carries the missiles around in his back pocket, or keeps them in his bedroom, constantly in his sight, as though he will personally fill the warheads with poison gas, fuel the missiles, lay in the target coordinates, and push the button to launch them with their deadly cargo.

Is this just a meaningless nitpick about rhetoric and terminology? Not at all.

If reality corresponded to the actual words in this article, then it would indeed be a major concern, but the reality is that, in fact, Saddam cannot launch missiles, or employ chemical warfare against our troops or Israel. He can only order others to do so.

He has to do so in the hope that his orders will be obeyed. Moreover, he has to do this in the face of the additional fact that we have been blanketing Iraq with leaflets and radio messages to the effect that if anyone carries out Saddam’s orders along these lines, they will share his fate, but that if they refuse to, they will be spared, and perhaps even rewarded.

The issue is not the level of Saddam’s desperation, but the desperation and motivation of those who would have to carry out his dictates, with the knowledge that regardless of what they do, the US is going to prevail. Saddam may know that his fate is sealed, and not care what happens to his country after he’s gone, but when most below him know that their fate will depend on their actions, he can have no confidence that they will follow his orders.

In that sense, Iraq will be very much like Afghanistan. Once it was generally realized that the Taliban’s days were numbered, with ongoing and increasing American military pressure, and that the number was a small one, the number became even smaller, because anyone with half a brain decided to join up with the winning side. The Iraqi people, even the ones who man the missiles, are not stupid. They know what happened to anyone who opposed the US a dozen years ago, and because of the leaflet campaign, they know that the Americans will be even more determined this time. Given a choice between surrender to an enemy that showed mercy to those surrendering the last time, and committing a war crime, most will make the right choice.

For this reason, the fears here are overblown. Does that mean that it won’t happen? Of course not–just that the risk is much less than stated here. It’s possible that Saddam will take his top lieutenants, the ones who will be in the dock with him in any war crimes trial, and are just as “desperate,” and use them to enforce his commands. But I don’t know if there are enough of them to make this work, or that they will be smart enough to know if the missiles are being armed properly, or aimed properly by those carrying out orders at gunpoint.

But my main point is that articles like this would be more useful to the public if they were more nuanced, and make the same points that I just did here, instead of simplistically saying things like “Saddam will kill Israelis.”

Saddam may want to kill Israelis, but the day that Saddam’s wishes become reality are rapidly coming to an end.

Unilateralism

Saddam Hussein has been in unending defiance of the United Nations since shortly after he invaded Kuwait. As part of a negotiated end to hostilities, he agreed to give up his ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. For over a decade, he has misled, lied, dissembled, distracted, evaded, and otherwise avoided meeting his reponsibilities under that agreement, all while running one of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet.

Last fall, the United Nations, with the acquiescence of France, Germany, Greece and Russia, gave him one final chance to meet his obligations and disarm. He has been in, and continues to be, in material breach of that commitment, in myriad ways, well documented elsewhere. He continues to, in the British phrase, “cock a snoop” at the United Nations.

So why, in defiance of the United Nations and the world, do France, Germany, Russia and Greece continue to help him delay and give him more time to achieve his foul ends?

Prometheus: Giver of Fire

Okay, so the President didn’t announce the new space nuclear power initiative in the State of the Union address.

He didn’t mention space at all, except in the national-security context of missile defense, and even then it was only implied–the word itself wasn’t used.

Of course, I covered my bases–I didn’t say he would, just that he might. It’s not surprising, because having heard the speech, I’m not sure that such an announcement would have fit in politically–there’s not a major constituency for such things in the country, and after pleasing some of the environmental community with the hydrogen-car initiative, he probably didn’t want to alienate the significant segment of it that’s vehemently and irrationally anti-nuclear power in any form.

That doesn’t mean that the space nuclear power program isn’t happening, of course. It’s now expected (and I’ve got much higher confidence in this prediction than the State of the Union address) that it will be announced on Monday (February 3), if not by the president, then by NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, with the unveiling of the proposed federal budget.

So what does it mean for our future in space?

I’ve become famous (or notorious) in the space community for declaring that the Emperor at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has no clothes–that we don’t need new space technology. To the degree that I proclaim that, it is with regard to earth-to-orbit transportation. I stand by that position, with the proviso that new technology can help, but it’s enhancing, not enabling, when it comes to dramatically reducing the costs of getting into space.

But as the late great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, famously wrote, once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere. And getting the rest of the distance, sans new technology, is indeed a challenge.

Yes, the Moon is just a few days away with chemical propulsion, and we can similarly get to Mars, and the asteroids by combining oxidizer with fuel, but the scheduled opportunities to get there are driven by the implacable rule of orbital mechanics, and always involve many months, and the outer planets are always years away, for man or machine. To get around these constraints, we do indeed need new technology.

And on most parts of the earth’s moon, night is not just a little longer than the duration of a human sleep period. It lasts for over two weeks. Solar power is not an option, unless you can store the energy to get through the long absence of the sun. It can be done, but it in turn involves other technologies, of batteries or capacitors or the pumping of currently non-existent water in non-existent reservoirs, that are even more unattainable than nuclear power, with which we have decades of experience.

Or imagine an asteroid on a course intersecting with the earth–one that could devastate human civilization when it hits in a few years. It is still far away, and too far from the sun to use solar power to do anything useful to change its course.

Space nuclear power can solve all of these problems.

It is compact, it is well understood (by the relevant technologists), it can be employed with safety, and it is more than ample for the requirements. That NASA hasn’t been investing in it over the past couple decades was due not to the lack of need for it, but because of politics and bureaucratic fear of objections by the ignorant but noisy purveyors of hysteria.

There are (at least) two types of nuclear power for space applications. One has been used for years, and is the cause of NASA’s previous hesitance to advance the technology, due to uninformed protests against it in the past. This is called radioisotope thermal generation (RTG), in which a decaying amount of radioactive material (generally plutonium) emits heat to create a small amount of electricity via a thermocouple. This is the means by which we’ve powered the electronics of all of our spacecraft to the outer planets (i.e., Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) without which we wouldn’t have gathered the spectacular pictures and knowledge over the past three decades, despite the technofantasies of the anti-nuke crowd.

But the limited capabilities of RTGs, while useful to provide electrical power for the electronics of our previous limited space endeavors, will not be adequate for the applications described above. For those, we will need robust, high-power systems: to melt the frigid ice of the Moon and comets into life-giving water: to take that same water and convert it to steam for propulsion and power: to power the plasma ships that will make trips to other planets and planetary bodies a matter of weeks, rather than months or years, at schedules of our choosing; to break the chemical bonds of lunar silicates and stony iron asteroids to build a new industrial age off our home planet.

Such systems mean actual nuclear reactors in space, something that the Russians have had, but we have not. Unfortunately, when the Russians did it, it was as the Soviet Union, a totalitarian dictatorship whose consideration for things like safety was…imperfect.

Even without ignorant anti-nuclear hysteria, actual past entries of working Soviet nuclear reactors into the atmosphere and on the heads of unsuspecting earthly inhabitants hasn’t aided the cause of nuclear space systems. Nonetheless, this technology is absolutely necessary, it can be done safely, and NASA’s biggest challenge will not be in developing it, or even in developing it safely (though this is obviously essential as well) but in proving to the skeptics (at least the ones that matter) that they can, will and have done so.

Regardless of NASA’s frustrating lack of progress on the earth-to-orbit front, this is a critical technology that must be developed in parallel with efforts, both public and private, to make it more affordable to get off the planet where it will be useful. If they start now, perhaps by the time it’s ready for use, we’ll be ready to use it.

Dual Tragedies

In addition to Tuesday’s anniversary of the Challenger disaster seventeen years ago, Monday saw the thirty-sixth anniversary of the loss of the crew of Apollo 1. Take a moment and remember the pioneers who died to expand life into the universe.

And A Chauffeured Car In Every Garage

I haven’t gotten around to describing my disappointment with Bush’s speech last night, but he just reminded me, as I listen to his speech in Grand Rapids, that the difference between “compassionate conservatism” and big-government liberalism is getting harder and harder to discern.

I just heard him say that if some aspect of health care (I think that it was prescription drugs) was good enough for Congress, it was good enough for our senior citizens. Ted Kennedy made exactly the same argument back in the eighties, and the argument was just as stupid then.

Let’s extend it to its natural conclusion. If chauffeur service to and from the Capitol is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If free haircuts is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If large staffs and offices are good enough for our Congressmen, they’re good enough for our senior citizens.

A chicken in every pot, and chauffeurs, haircuts and office staff for everyone!

While I’m all in favor of cutting back on some congressional perks, that’s beside the point. It’s absurd to think that perquisites of office, or even benefits of employment, of elected officials should bear any relationship to government handouts to private citizens. If you think that our tax dollars should go to pay for prescription drugs for the chronologically challenged, then put forth a rational case for it, but don’t expect me to give it to them just because it’s part of the compensation of a Congressman.

Regret

I just saw something astonishing on CNN. If you’re wondering why I’m watching CNN, instead of Fox, I’m staying in an extended-stay place in San Bruno, just across the border from South San Francisco, and that’s the only news channel on the cable. Watching Christiane Amanpour bloviate on about what “they” think of us over in the Middle East makes it seem like I went back in time, when they were the only all-news channel.

Anyway, they actually ran a story that described the possibility of terrorism if we don’t take out Saddam, and included the potential costs, which could be hundreds of billions of dollars.

Opponents of the war always dismiss the possibility that Saddam might be involved with terrorism here. I thought that I’d put together a game-theory matrix to look at a range of the possible states of the world, and their potential costs, given various actions.

Continue reading Regret

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