WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 9 Apr 10 Washington, DC

[Sam Wormley]

> WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 9 Apr 10 Washington, DC
>
> 1. RESTART: WHY NOT, WE STILL HAVE THOUSANDS MORE.
> The New START Treaty, signed yesterday in Prague by Obama and Medvedev,
> extends bilateral arms reduction agreements between the U.S. and Russia
> begun in 1991. It will limit operationally deployed nuclear warheads to
> 1,500, which is down nearly two-thirds from the first START treaty in
> 1991, and 30 percent lower than the 2002 Moscow Treaty. It also reduces
> the number of delivery systems. Many thousands more nuclear weapons are
> not deployed. It‘s difficult to explain to today’s students how two
> seemingly enlightened peoples could have gotten into a standoff based on
> Mutually Assured Destruction. I can’t even explain to myself how I came
> to spend ten years of my life in the nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile,
> Iran proudly unveils its new uranium centrifuges today.
>
> 2. BEYOND GREEN: BORLAUG’S "TWO CONTENDING POWERS."
> As told by Kieron Humphrey on BBC News, Zambian farmer Elleman Mumbia
> broke with local custom to practice scientific "conservation farming." His
> tiny farm flourished. Some neighbors muttered about juju (voodoo), but he
> has become something of a hero on national media. The BBC story stops
> there, but a sadder chapter is being written. In his 1970 Nobel Peace
> Prize acceptance speech, Norman Borlaug said, "We are dealing with two
> opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic
> power of human reproduction." K.H. von Hoffmann, who called my attention
> to the BBC story, points out that Mr. Mumbia has six children (about
> average in Zambia). The farm is too small to be subdivided. Most of his
> children will look for jobs in the city and end up in the slums, as young
> people are doing all over Africa.
>
> 3. APOCRYPHA: SCIENCE BOARD HIDES AMERICAN IGNORANCE.
> The National Science Board, established by Congress as a national science
> policy body, oversees NSF and provides independent science policy advice
> to the President and Congress. It issues a huge biennial report, Science
> and Engineering Indicators, which is a compendium of quantitative data on
> the science enterprise around the world. The results are disturbing. In
> their understanding of science, polls found, most Americans are falling
> behind, even though much of the progress was made by American scientists
> and engineers. Congress needs to hear these facts. Instead, poll
> questions dealing with the origin of the universe and evolution were
> simply excised from the report The board member who took the lead in
> removing the text was John T. Bruer, a philosopher with close ties to the
> Vatican. I hope that Science will publish the apocryphal text so we may
> judge its relevance for ourselves.
>
> THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
> Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
> University of Maryland, but they should be.
> ---
> Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org

[Matt]

On Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:35:23 -0500, Sam Wormley wrote:

>> WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 9 Apr 10 Washington, DC

>> It‘s difficult to explain to today’s students how two
>> seemingly enlightened peoples could have gotten into a standoff based on
>> Mutually Assured Destruction.

It assumes sanity: The enemy may be willing to risk prevailing in a
zero-sum game, but not to take an action which would surely
precipitate their own destruction.

>> Meanwhile, Iran proudly unveils its new uranium centrifuges today.

Perhaps a flawed assumption where seventy virgins await those who
attack with disregard for temporal conseqences.