Reflections

The Insanities of Our Times

We have no choice but to call a spade a spade. Those who still have a pinch of common sense find it easy to see how little realism is being left in today’s world.

When American President Barack Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore said, “Now, earn it.” Many people liked the ingenious comment; it was a smart phrase, even though many found the decision of the Norwegian Committee an example of demagoguery and the exaltation of the apparently harmless petty-politics of the new US President, an African-American, a good communicator and a clever politician leading a powerful empire involved in a deep economic crisis.

The World Conference in Copenhagen was about to be held and Obama sparked off hopes that the United States would join the world consensus in favor of a binding agreement to prevent the ecologic catastrophe threatening the human species. What happened there was disappointing; the international public had become the victim of a painful deception.

At the recent World Conference of the Peoples on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Land held in Bolivia responses were offered filled with the wisdom of the ancient indigenous nationalities, invaded and virtually devastated by the European conquerors who, in search of gold and easy wealth, imposed for centuries their selfish cultures incompatible with the most sacred interests of mankind.

Two news reports received yesterday are an expression of the empire’s philosophy intending to make us believe in its “democratic, peaceful, selfless and honest” nature. Suffice it to read the text of said press dispatches dated in the US capital.           

WASHINGTON, April 23, 2010. - US President Barack Obama is examining the possibility of deploying an arsenal of missiles with conventional non-nuclear warheads and a very powerful explosion capacity that can hit their targets anywhere in the world in about an hour.

Albeit the new super-bomb, delivered by Minuteman missiles, will not carry nuclear warheads their destructive capability will be similar, as confirmed by the fact that their deployment is foreseen in the recently signed START 2 agreements with Russia.

The Moscow authorities demanded, and managed to include in the agreement, that the United States will remove one of its nuclear warhead missiles for each one of these missiles.

According to reports in the New York Times and the CBS TV network, the new bomb known as Prompt Global Strike (PGS) should be able to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan, destroy a North Korean missile in full preparation or attack an Iranian nuclear site, ‘all of this without crossing the nuclear threshold.’

The advantage of having the military option of a non-nuclear weapon with the same effect of the targeted impact of a nuclear bomb is judged interesting by the Obama Administration.

The project had been initially undertaken by Obama’s predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, but it was blocked by Moscow’s protestations. The Russian authorities had said that given the Minuteman’s capability to deliver nuclear warheads, it was impossible to determine that the launching of a PGS did not mark the beginning of a nuclear attack.

However, the Obama Administration feels that it can give Russia and China the necessary guarantees to avoid misunderstandings. The missile silos of the new weapon will be raised in areas distant from the nuclear warhead deposits and they can be regularly supervised by experts from Moscow or Beijing.

The super-bomb could be delivered by a Minuteman missile capable of flying through the atmosphere at sound speed while carrying one thousand pounds of explosives. Then, extremely sophisticated equipment will enable the missile to release the bomb letting it fall with great accuracy on the selected targets.

Responsibility for the PGS project –at an estimated cost of $250 million only in its first experimental year—fell on General Kevin Chilton, commander of the US nuclear arsenal. Chilton explained that the PGS will be filling up a gap in the range of options currently available to the Pentagon.

‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘we can target any place in the world with non-nuclear weapons in a frame of time of no less than four hours.’ ‘For a faster action,’ he conceded, ‘we only have the nuclear option.’

With the new bomb, in the future the United States could act quickly and with conventional resources both against a terrorist group or an enemy country, in a much shorter time and avoiding international indignation over the use of nuclear weapons.

It is planned to start testing in 2014 and to have it available in the US arsenal by 2017. Obama will no longer be in power but the super-bomb can be the non-nuclear legacy of this President who was already awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

WASHINGTON, April 22, 2010. -  A US Air Force non-piloted spaceship took off from Florida this Thursday, its military mission covered by veil of secrecy.

The automated spaceship or X-37B was launched from Cape Canaveral in an Atlas V rocket at the 19:52 hours local time (23:52 hrs GMT), according to a video distributed by the army.

‘The launching is imminent,’ said to the France Press Agency US Air Force Major Angie Blair.

The plane looking like a miniature spaceship is 8.9 meters long by 4.5 meters wingspan.

It has taken years to manufacture the reusable spaceship and the army has offered only vague explanations on its objective or its role in the military arsenal.

The vehicle has been designed ‘to create the ambiance of an “orbital laboratory” to put to the test new technologies and components before these technologies are assigned to ongoing satellite programs,’ stated the Air Force in a recent communiqué.

Officials have said that the X-37B will be landing at the Vandenberg Air Force base in California, although they did not say how long its first mission will last.

‘To be honest, we don’t know when it will return,’ said to the press this week Gary Payton, second assistant secretary of the Air Force space programs.

Payton indicated that the ship could stay in space up to nine months.

The aircraft, manufactured by Boeing, started in 1999 as a US National Space Agency (NASA) project and was later transferred to the Air Force, which has plans to launch a second X-37B by 2011.

Do they need anything else?

Today they face an enormous obstacle: the already unstoppable climate change. There is talk of the unavoidable rise of heat by more than two degrees centigrade, with catastrophic consequences. Within only 40 years, the world population will increase in 2 billion to reach the figure of 9 billion people in that short time. Harbors, hotels, tourist resorts, roads, industries and facilities close to the ports will be underwater in less time than a generation from a wealthy and developed nation needs to enjoy half their lives, the same nations that today selfishly refuse to make the least of sacrifices to preserve the survival of the human species. The farming land and the drinking water will be considerably reduced. The oceans will be contaminated and many marine species will no longer be edible while others will be extinct. This is not simply a logical assertion but the result of scientific research.

Through natural genetics and the transfer of various species from one continent to another, human beings had been able to increase food and other useful crop productions per hectare. Thus, for some time, man suffered less from the shortage of such food as maize, potato, wheat, fiber and other necessary products. Later, genetic manipulation and the use of chemical fertilizers also contributed to the solution of crucial needs but they too are coming to the end of their possibilities to produce healthy food for human consumption.

On the other hand, we are witnessing the depletion in barely two centuries of the hydrocarbons that it took nature 400 million years to create. Likewise, crucial no-renewable mineral resources required by the world economy are being depleted. At the same time, science has created the capacity to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of hours. The major contradiction of our times is precisely the capacity of the human species for self-destruction and its inability to govern itself.

The human being managed to raise its life possibilities to such limits as exceed its own capacity to survive, and in this battle they are consuming at an accelerated pace the raw materials available to them. Science made it possible to turn matter into energy, as in the case of the nuclear reaction, --through large investments-- but there is no sign that turning energy into matter is even viable. The infinite cost of investments in the relevant research is showing the impossibility to achieve in a few decades what it took the universe tens of thousands of millions of years to create. Will it be necessary for Barack Obama, the wunderkind, to explain it to us? Science has experienced a remarkable growth but ignorance and poverty grow too. Can anyone prove the opposite?


Fidel Castro Ruz
April 25, 2010
6:30 PM

Date: 

25/04/2010