When I first saw the title of this article in MIT’s Technology Review, I first thought of a song from “The Producers“.
Richard Muller, of Cal Berkeley’s Physics department, says that an attack on Iraq will happen because Iraq’s been working on an ‘gun style’ bomb, like the one the US used on Hiroshima, and that Saddam will use it. The advantage of such a bomb is that it’s simple and doesn’t require sophisticated testing. You slap the two sub-critical masses together and foom.
Unfortunately, Muller loses me when he explains that the reason Saddam would use an fission bomb is because he’s evil. That argument works when you’re a comicbook superhero, but for the rest of us mere mortals, it’s lazy thinking. I know perfectly well that Saddam is willing to lie and kill to acheive his aims. But explaining that by saying he’s evil and leaving it at that doesn’t help.
Remember, we (as in the US) are killing and lying (you might prefer the term dissembling) to achieve our policy goals. But we’re not evil (the last time I checked), and we have a compelling story about why we’re doing what we’re doing: to protect ourselves, to disrupt terrorist activity, to put a government in Afghanistan that isn’t the bitch of Bin Laden’s people.
If you’re telling the story of why we’re good and they are bad: I need something more sophsticated than Harry Potter.
