Opinion/Editorial
THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE
Hilarious. That’s about the only word that comes to mind when one considers the likelihood of any foreign dignitary ever speaking the truth, keeping any word, holding to any treaty, or believing one word of whatever the leader (now or on into the future) of the United States of America says. This nation has never bombed another without warning before, and never threatened to commit violence to acquire land and population of friendly allied countries, and so on. Internationally, the nations of the world are currently standing and sitting back to laugh and make jokes about what a wildly powerful laughingstock the USA has become, and it was remarkably capable of transforming itself from the cutting-edge integrity force of the planet into an undisguised and many times admitted acceptor and deliverer of ‘reality’ to the rest of the world. The word reality may be subject to interpretation, but tough love is possibly the most accurate way to describe this new attitude supported by actions that the US is using on the other cultures of the planet and, even more amazingly, on most members (think those in poverty, disabled, old, of color and women) of its social order. For many, the humor of it all can be illustrated by using the phrase ‘gallows humor.’
“May you live in interesting times,’ is an ancient Chinese curse. Interesting times were, and remain, those times where the boredom and humdrum continuance of having plenty of food, clean water, comfortable housing, and a grandly protected and basal feeling of constant peace, safety and happiness, go away and are replaced by just the opposite, therefore requiring an entire population to survive alive while enduring a level of misery that developed countries (like the U.S.) have come to consider a thing of the past.
Iran has gone silent after being attacked devastatingly by both Israel and the U.S. This assault on the country has been done ‘defensively’ by both these formerly democratic countries and performed against a supposedly religiously autocratic country. That country, which is supposed to have had its nuclear development equipment, scientists, and enriched inventory destroyed or obliterated, has been silent. A feeble pre-warned attack on one American military base abroad was the only response. It is rumored that the Iranians were able to squirrel away about nine hundred pounds of enriched uranium they’d produced over the last thirty years before America used the only conventional bunker-busting bombs on the planet.
Nine hundred pounds. The ability to produce an atomic bomb would depend upon how enriched that potential supply might be. If it is enriched to about ninety-nine percent, then creating a critical mass is possible. How to do that part of constructing such a device is not hard. Take an old artillery barrel. Pack one end with fifty pounds of enriched material into one end. Seal up that end of the barrel. Take another fifty pounds and pack it from the other end into the middle of that barrel. Now pace the rest of the barrel, from the center pack in enriched material, to the other end with a couple of hundred pounds of high explosives. Weld the other end of the barrel closed. If the explosive is ignited, then one mass of the material will be driven to fuse with the other mass. That collision will result in the creation of plasma. That plasma will then form a critical mass of atoms that become so excited that an extremely fast form of fission occurs.
That event is called an atomic explosion. Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Not hydrogen bombs, which are much lighter and more powerful. Delivery would, if this occurs, become the only other problem to solve. None of this information is classified, and all of it is available to every country in the world. The vastly more difficult job is to enrich the uranium to such a highly volatile state, as has been proven by all countries that have developed such weapons. There are only nine countries that possess these weapons. Those are: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. None of them has ever used them against another country except the United States.
The current leadership has placed the American public in the fearful position of having to wait and see if the Iranians, in their angry, silent state, have the material to make a bomb and then the willingness to find a way to use it. Why has the public voted in such a cavalier, devil-may-care, and potentially disastrous way, to allow its leaders to so expose it? No one can effectively answer that question, although most of that same public will not be worrying and will be happy to remain ignorant of the entire situation. Is knowing what such a silence can bring from an outraged nation being led by an outrageous culture’s leader offer much of any succor? Likely not, not when one’s own culture and leader begins to resemble that which it has always claimed it hated and would never become like.
