This is the Way the World Ends

By Don Williams

The end of the world "comes in on little cat feet," to borrow a phrase Carl
Sandburg once used to describe fog.

Silently, deceptively it arrives, largely because talking heads on TV and
syndicated columnists allow a fog of disinformation and distraction to
settle in. For instance, you likely know lots more about the Duke lacrosse
team than about this news from the L.A. Times of April 6:

"The Bush administration on Wednesday (April 5) unveiled a blueprint for
rebuilding the United States' decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including
restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity. The administration
wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as
the Pentagon retires older bombs that it claims will no longer be reliable
or safe..

"The administration is also moving quickly ahead with a new nuclear bomb
program known as the 'reliable replacement warhead,' which began last year.
Originally described as an effort to update existing weapons and make them
inherently more reliable, it has been broadened and now includes the
potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in a
design competition.."

One hundred-twenty-five new nukes per year. New bomb designs. How scary is
that? Like so many other initiatives by our government, this nuclear revival
violates several treaties we've signed. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
for instance, long ago called for an end of building, testing, storing and
trading in nuclear weapons materials.

Our recent agreement to provide India with a steady source of nuclear fuel
likely violates this treaty as well. Zbigniew Brezenski stated last week
that the new deal would give India the capacity to build up to 20 bombs a
year in facilities off-limits to inspection. He fretted that it would
kick-start a new arms race with India's nuclear neighbors, Pakistan and
China. Could be you never heard such pointed criticism of the deal as pretty
pictures from India flickered across your screen and attractive young news
anchors turned to lighter affairs. Likewise, I'll bet you heard little about
this report from the Jan. 23, 2005 issue of a respected paper called the UK
Independent on Sunday.

"Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts
to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate
watchdog.

"Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114
governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the
world has 'already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere' and called for immediate and very deep cuts in
the pollution if humanity is to survive.

"The Bush administration immediately tried to slap him down, not least
because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most
opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his
predecessor was too aggressive on the issue. Afterwards he told The
Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs and rapid melting
of ice in the Arctic had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point
the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached. Reefs throughout
the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise,
they lose their colors and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a
quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.

"And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the
Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its
ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades."

If humanity is to survive-300 scientists. Scared yet? Efforts to squelch
such news stretch back decades, but they've found a strong new ally in Bush.
Little noticed media reports show how his administration muzzled a top NASA
scientist whose own findings corroborate such dire predictions. Others
reveal how the EPA under Bush excised a Harvard study from a report because
it contradicted the government's rationale for lenient industry standards
regarding emissions of mercury, ubiquitous now in the world's oceans.

Lots of people, including some Bush and Cheney family members and friends,
have vested interests in technology that could destroy our world. The media'
s soft-pedaling of their conflicts of interest and outright crimes brings
home prophetic and poetic words from "The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot: "This
is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
Some days I'd settle for a whimper from talking heads who parrot the news,
though God knows an anguished cry is more in keeping.---

Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist and the founding editor and
publisher of New
Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary writing. His awards
include a National
Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden
Presscard Award and
the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He is finishing a novel, Red State Blues,
set in his native
Tennessee and Iraq. His book of selected journalism, "Heroes, Sheroes and
Zeroes, the Best
Writings About People" by Don Williams, is now available for ordering. For
more information,
email him at donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at
www.mach2.com.