Abstract
No “new” war
“A New Kind of War” (July/August Bulletin) for the new millennium? Just wars, right wars, wars that make us feel better? NATOized wars, sanitized wars, wars where we never see who we kill while we ourselves remain untouched?
I wish that author R.C. Longworth was correct. For if he were, something “amazing and positive” would truly be under way. But he is not.
There is no new kind of war. We have new kinds of bombs, but old kinds of death. Piles of bodies are now being discovered throughout Kosovo of those who were killed the “old fashioned way”–by individual killers using bullets and knives. B-2s dropped “better” bombs in a “better” way–killing more refugees and civilians than Serb soldiers.
Eroding sovereignty, the end of the Westphalian state–we've known about globalization for perhaps four decades (the “global village,” and so on).
Yet the motives and irrationalities that generate war seem not to fear Vaclav Havel's pronouncement that they are anachronisms. The nation-state of 1648 may no longer exist, and sovereignty is relative, and shared by nonstate actors. But none of this is new, and none of it lies at the core of warring behavior.
“It could just be junk mail, Colonel, or it could be the beginning of an enemy offensive.”
Change is neither as dramatic nor as overwhelming as Longworth would have us believe. There are still Great Powers, whether cast as the Contact Group in Europe or the G-8, or captured in bilateral photo-ops. Wars are still fought for the same fundamental reasons.
To assume that Serbs were fighting for territory–that their war was “precisely about borders”–misreads Serbs, the Balkans, and much more. The Serbs saw Kosovo as nation and culture, not a chunk of land. Wars were fought earlier for cultural primacy, religion, profit, or heinous principles. Taking and holding territory was more often than not the means to an end.
Globalization, the ubiquitous fin de siècle explain-everything-with-a-black-box concept, must be happening because everyone says it is. But no Rubicon will be crossed and no Y2K will end war as we know it. To suggest that globalization, weakened territorial impulses of states, and the Kosovo experience have coalesced to produce some tectonic shift in the way humans fight is far too abrupt and much too glib.
The author has airbrushed NATO's reasons for going to war.
True, Kosovo offers the “victor” no spoils. But this was not a war to defend Western civilization either, as NATO's internal discussions leading up to March 24, demonstrate. This was an alliance wracked by doubt about its own future, fast approaching tough decisions on a strategic concept. Having stood aside during three years of bloody ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, NATO headquarters and national policymakers understood that the alliance itself was endangered by Milosevic's offensive against Kosovar Albanians.
Had NATO “taken a pass” on Kosovo as it did on Bosnia, its own demise would have become plausible. The alliance had to act to save its own credibility and reputation.
Desperate craving for NATO and European Union membership is the stuff of Balkan cognoscenti. Ask a Ph.D. from a Balkan capital if he really thinks that NATO and/or EU membership would be the best damn thing for his/her country, and chances are roughly 100 percent that you will get an enthusiastic response.
But ask some ordinary people and you'll get different answers, particularly after the “new kind of war” seen in Kosovo and over Serbia. The Romanian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian publics substantially or overwhelmingly opposed NATO bombing, although the population of NATO ally Greece was even more negative. Czechs and Hungarians offered no public endorsement either.
There's no constant craving for NATO or the EU. Instead, and not surprisingly, one hears a yearning for security and prosperity. When the North Atlantic Alliance and European Union begin to look like they will not or cannot provide more security or prosperity, support plummets.
The “new world” that Longworth sees is at once compelling and ethereal. Playwright presidents make good copy, but they don't make history. Were Havel correct, then we should be seeing a rush to justice, with international intervention to halt crimes against humanity and violations of human dignity regardless of lines on maps.
But we aren't there yet. And we may never be. Some malevolent leaders can be stopped, a few heinous acts punished. To make these attempts is essential. But states, their struggle over territory, their wars and their genesis, and the ways of death and dying in those wars, remain about the same. Sad truths at the millennium.
Daniel N. Nelson
Global Concepts, Inc., Alexandria, Virginia
This is a follow-up to my letter, “The End of Openness,” which was published in the May/June Bulletin. The Energy Department published the following statement in the May 1999 issue of OD Communiqué, an intra-agency newsletter of the former Office of Declassification (now known as the Office of Nuclear and National Security Information):
“The Associated Press provided a story on Tuesday, May 11, 1999, following up on the Secretary [of Energy's] initiative to strengthen security at the DOE. This article, in part, implied that the DOE's openness initiative was being downgraded. The mistaken assumption in this article is that enhancing security measures is somehow contrary to responsible openness.
“The Department has supported and will continue to support both the national security and nonproliferation goals of the Nation as well as the need to provide the public access to as much Government information as possible, consistent with these goals. …
“It should be noted that there is no moratorium on DOE's information or document declassification efforts or Freedom of Information Act efforts.”
I can personally attest to the truth of at least part of the latter statement: Declassified documents are continuing to pour into one public repository that I frequent. However, there has been no noticeable step-up in FOIA request processing, and the other points I raised in my May letter–concerning the halt or slowing of a wide variety of releases and updates–are still valid.
Chuck Hansen
Editor, The Swords of Armageddon
Unresolved public health issues, potentially important to northern New Mexico, are tied in with the history of Rocky Flats, recounted in “The Day We Almost Lost Denver,” by Len Ackland (July/August Bulletin). The fire may have had an impact–albeit an indirect one–at Los Alamos National Laboratory as well.
A reciprocal relationship has long existed between these two facilities, and several lines of historical evidence suggest that the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) warhead production activities may have been shifted to Los Alamos after the May 1969 fire at Rocky Flats, with consequent impacts on the local environment and workplace safety.
The main plutonium facility at Los Alamos from 1948 to 1978 was DP West at Technical Area 21. A 1990 internal Los Alamos analysis of historical air emissions from DP West contains data suggesting a 20-fold rise in total stack emissions of plutonium in the last six months of 1969. Although based on crude data and simplifying assumptions, this provocative analysis was never completed by the Los Alamos Environmental Restoration Program scientists who initiated it–and they have since dodged efforts by outside scientists who wish to discuss it with them.
Furthermore, historical monitoring data for July 1 to July 17, 1969 (just two months after the fire at Rocky Flats), show apparent levels of airborne “alpha Pu” in the workroom air 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than normal. The work areas affected were the hot cells, the equipment room, and other rooms in Building 4 at DP West. However, the data available for the stacks does not show a corresponding spike. Interestingly, beside each of the extremely high numbers recorded for July 1-17, there is a hand-written note: “These figures should not be recorded on yearly report.”
Dutifully, the annual report for 1969 contains no hint of anything the least bit unusual at DP West. An emissions inventory prepared for the AEC'S area office for 1967-69 claims that one of the affected hot cells at DP West was “not in use” in 1969. An interview I conducted with a retired monitor from DP West in 1996 could not resolve this issue, although he expressed dismay on reviewing the historical data because the equipment room “was supposed to be clean.” My search of the lab's occurrence reports collection was unavailing.
What specific activities at Los Alamos account for the rise in air emissions of plutonium from Technical Area 21 in the second half of 1969 after the Rocky Flats pit production facility was shut down by the May 11 fire? And what caused astronomical levels of workroom air contamination at DP West in the first two weeks of July 1969?
In the weeks following the fire, Glenn Seaborg, then AEC chairman, wrote to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, indicating that the AEC's “immediate concern” was to continue production of test devices “by some combination of development-related facilities at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Rocky Flats.” Whether this or some other AEC objective might account for the unusual plutonium monitoring results described above is not yet clear.
Also contained in the 1990 internal analysis of plutonium emissions from DP West is an estimate of 1-2 curies of airborne releases per year in 1951, 1952, and 1953–a serious discrepancy with the official number of 1.3 curies as the total released during the entire 30 years of DP West's operation. What accounts for the discrepancy? Was official concern over plutonium air emissions from DP West in the early 1950s a contributing factor in the decision to build Rocky Flats in 1954?
Today, with Rocky Flats shut down, plutonium pits are being produced at Los Alamos's Technical Area 55, built in 1978. The decision to produce pits at Los Alamos was made with almost no independent analysis of the impacts of its past production activities on human health or the environment. Government “impact statements” are rife with information and assumptions that are contradicted by historical documents.
Meanwhile, excesses of brain, thyroid, and childhood cancers around Los Alamos remain “unexplained.” The Phase I Historical Documents Discovery Project recently initiated by the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) Radiation Studies Branch may be the best and last chance to shed light on Los Alamos's past record as a production facility. But no sooner did the CDC embark on this three-year project in January than the Chinese spy scandal broke, leading to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's 18-month moratorium on declassification of Cold War-era documents, which was announced in May. The impact of the moratorium on CDC's work at Los Alamos is not yet clear.
Concerned citizens and health scientists everywhere should support the CDC's effort to review–and make public–historical documents at Los Alamos, and the CDC should proceed to dose reconstruction if that is warranted. As Ackland's article demonstrates–in terms that are both compelling and chilling–plutonium pit production is one technology whose failures and near misses deserve the highest level of outside scrutiny.
Ken Silver
Santa Fe, New Mexico
In “Political Minefield” (March/April Bulletin), Michael Flynn reported that philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute gave $3 million to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. This statement is inaccurate and leaves a false impression. The institute and its affiliated organizations have awarded grants totaling more than $3 million since 1997 to dozens of organizations working toward ridding the world of landmines.
These organizations include Handicap International, Mines Advisory Group, Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Afghan Campaign to Ban Landmines, Human Rights Watch, Landmine Survivors Network, medico international, Norwegian People's Aid, and others around the globe, in addition to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
By supporting these groups, the institute concluded that it could most effectively use its expertise and limited resources to focus on comprehensive efforts to halt the use of these indiscriminate weapons, force the destruction of stocks, commit governments to clear mines, and improve assistance to victims and survivors.
Ann Peters
Director, Open Society Institute, Landmines Project, Washington, D.C.