Abstract
Outrageous omission
I regret having to compose my first communication to the Bulletin in the form of a criticism, but Mohammed Ahmedullah's recent article “Mahathir Says ‘Get Smart’” (March/April 2004), reinterpreting the October 16, 2003 speech by Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohammed, is simply outrageous.
The Bulletin failed to mention Mahathir's remarks on weapons development. A translation of that section of his speech reads: “Unfortunately, we stress not defense but the weapons of the time of the Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us anymore. We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense. But because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc. as giving no merit for the akhirat [Islamic afterlife], today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defense.”
Mahathir clearly places the desirability of schooling in mathematics and science in the context of skills necessary for Muslims to construct weapons of mass destruction. This pandering must also be interpreted in the context of nuclear proliferation. The distribution of weapons of mass destruction to the Islamic world has been directly supported by Malaysia. For example, centrifuges designed in Pakistan and originating in Malaysia have been distributed to, among others, Iran and Libya. This has been an open secret to Western intelligence communities for many years, and these proliferation activities have been conducted with the connivance of the Pakistani intelligence service.
While I could continue to cite numerous and specific instances to buttress the notion that the laudatory interpretation of Mahathir's speech is simply wrong, I believe my point has been made.
Durango, Colorado
In need of media
The article “Democracy or Dominion?” (January/February 2004), in which Walter Uhler traces the ups and downs of our experiment in democracy, is a fascinating capsule history: elitism v. populism, the move from republic to empire, the continuous effort of those in power to control the national agenda, the atrocious state of public education, the role of the media, and much more.
Walter Lippmann, Uhler notes, was moved to write his classic Public Opinion because of President Wood-row Wilson's successful manufacture of “consent and suppression of dissent during World War I.” Lippmann noted the difficulty–almost the impossibility–of creating an informed citizenry. And things have not improved since. Those in the seats of political and economic power inevitably wish to shape public opinion so as to justify their actions and portray all criticism as uninformed or even subversive.
And it is a disaster when our “watchdog” media behave more like a lapdog, while a jingoist administration cons Congress into approving an unjustified “preemptive” attack on another nation. Unfortunately, we cannot always afford to wait until Washington's policies have failed before the press reveals the official stupidity and/or malfeasance. Nor should we have to wait until long after the implosion of an Enron and the disaster of a national energy crisis to learn of self-dealing by the titans of commerce and industry and their all-too-often chummy relations with the government agencies that are supposed to restrain their excesses.
It is possible, though, to be fairly well informed. In this sense, readers of the Bulletin are singularly blessed.
San Francisco, California
Degrading peer review
Thank you for your editor's note “Something Must Be Done” (March/April 2004), criticizing the White House plan to take over government peer review and centralize it in the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). I thoroughly agree with you.
I'm a consultant with lots of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) support work under my belt, including a couple of complicated and controversial peer reviews. I didn't sit on the panels, but I drafted the charges, reviewed the resumes, identified conflicts of interest, scheduled meetings, reserved hotel rooms, contracted a court reporter, wrote minutes and summaries for the EPA and state regulators, and documented site visits.
My first reaction to the OMB proposal included nausea, blurred vision, and twitching fingers. Second and third readings haven't improved my response! If the author of the proposal has more than the slightest clue about how federal peer reviews work (according to firmly established protocols), it isn't evident in the proposal. This attempt to improve the credibility of future peer reviews will be a colossal and embarrassing flop. That is exactly what I am looking forward to.
Littleton, Colorado
Not so science-y after all
Since high school biology, taken 60-plus years ago, is the extent of what might be termed my “formal” education in science, I had some doubts about subscribing to the Bulletin. However, as an avid reader who keeps a good dictionary handy, I decided it was worth a year's subscription to see if I could “muddle through.”
Having now received three issues, you can imagine my delight as I have found that there is no need to “muddle through”–things are not couched in such scientific terms that the layman cannot understand. Your articles are both interesting and informative, and it's surprising how many express my own thoughts and feelings. I particularly enjoyed the far-ranging March/April issue, where no article or sidebar item went unread. You can be sure that this is one subscription I will be renewing.
Williston, Florida
Delusions of power
While the venom of Khurram Husain's hostility toward the Bush administration was evident in his article “Pakistan: Disparities in Power” (March/April 2004), the logic of his argument was not.
Husain implies that simple pride and courage may have been part of, or central to, Mullah Omar's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden. I suggest that a more obvious reason was simple and massive miscalculation. Both he and bin Laden thought they were dealing with Bill Clinton and that the United States couldn't or wouldn't decisively retaliate. They were wrong.
Contrary to his obviously cherished view of the United States as a predatory state (“a great power, drunk on delusions of its own omnipotence, stiff with the arrogance and indulgence that such follies bring”), in the aftermath of 9/11 the United States clearly had to take drastic measures to deal with an immediate, clear, massive, and continuing threat. What we have done so far has, all things considered, been both proportionate and restrained.
Burke, Virginia
Details at Scanzano
As a consultant for Sogin, the state-owned company responsible for the decommissioning of Italy's nuclear reactors, I wanted to point out a number of inaccuracies in Linda Gunter's report on the protest against a nuclear waste facility, “Showdown at Scanzano” (March/April 2004).
The article states that according to criteria cited in a government-commissioned report, Scanzano should have been ruled out from being selected as the site for a national nuclear waste repository because of a number of factors. But the criteria included in the cited government report refer to near-surface disposal sites. The exclusion criteria for repositories in deep geological formations, which was the type of site proposed for Scanzano, are significantly different. They do not include, at least as a first priority criteria, population growth or human activities such as agriculture or tourism.
The statement “the area is seismically active” is also not correct, if referring to the safety of disposing radioactive waste in the Scanzano deep salt formation. According to Claudio Eva, president of the European Seismologic Commission, “the site, on the basis of present knowledge, is one of the most qualified from the safety point of view.”
The article states that much of the radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of is spent fuel from Italy's four reactors. In fact, the spent fuel from Italy's four reactors is, in terms of volume, a minimal part (some 800-1,000 cubic meters, including the volume of storage casks) of the 70,000 cubic meters of the total inventory.
Rome, Italy
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Update
On March 23, Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander of Russia's navy, made a splash when he sent back to port Peter the Great, nuclear cruiser and flagship of Russia's Northern Fleet, saying it could “explode at any moment.” Kuroyedov quickly amended his statement, saying the ship needed only routine maintenance.
Kuroyedov was unnecessarily “dramatizing the situation,” according to the Norwegian watchdog group Bellona, which believes the ship is in no immediate danger.
This is good news, but Russia's Northern Fleet is the source of significant environmental worries for neighbor Norway. In “Russia: Kola Cleanup Coming?” (March/April 2003 Bulletin), authors Ole Reistad, Morten Maerli, and Johnny Skorve reported on Andreeva Bay, a rundown, radioactively contaminated graveyard for Russian nuclear waste that Norway wants to clean up. “Because of shoddy storage practices, at the moment nobody–perhaps not even the Russians themselves–knows what kind of material is stored at Andreeva.”
Liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments, which Jerry Havens wrote about in the July/August 2003 Bulletin, are back in the news thanks to protests by folks living near LNG terminals. “The protest coincides with the disclosure in the new book by former White House counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke that Al Qaeda operatives infiltrated Boston around the time of the millennium celebration by boarding inbound [LNG] tankers” (Washington Post, March 27).
Discussions of risk and probability in LNG transport, Havens wrote, “must now consider malicious acts as well” as account for human error.