Are we ever told the
truth about what is done in the name of security? This is
what the United States did not tell us about its own
proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world - since
1951!
• Read
"Where the Nukes Were" in the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists
"Soon complete weapon systems found their way to all
sorts of places &emdash; Okinawa, Japan, South Korea and
the Philippines in the Pacific for example, and Morocco,
France, and then most of the NATO countries in the West.
Sometimes U.S. allies knew they were hosting nuclear
weapons; sometimes they didn't. Then, too, the United
States was occasionally a little too eager to share
control with its NATO buddies..." This is the full
list of
where these nuclear weapons were.
- and here follow the news reports about this
shocking report:
• The
United States scattered nuclear weapons around the
globe
Here is an official Pentagon report on the
places where bombs or bomb components minus their nuclear
charges were located between 1951 and 1977. The names of
18 other locations were blacked out by government censors
before the document was released to Robert S. Norris, a
private specialist on nuclear weapons and author of
numerous books on the topic. Using other documents,
Norris and his co-authors said they could identify 17 of
those other locations, ringing the globe from Canada to
Iceland to South Korea and Japan, writes Robert Burns
for Nando Times and Associated Press on October 18,
1999. And this is what Reuters
wrote about this shocking report.
So, people get nuclear bombs - but that is not
exactly what they want. If this is so, how much democracy
is there in the nuclear age?
• So
Everyone Wants Peace, So What?
"Recently I invited friends around the world to ask their
friends and neighbors a simple question: "What would the
world be like if it were what you REALLY WANT, not what
you've learned to settle for or what you think is
possible? What do you REALLY WANT the world to be like
for your children and grandchildren?...
There were no differences. Nearly all of us highly varied
people want the same kind of world, though our ways of
describing that world can be different and colorful --
and, I discovered, wonderful," writes Donella Meadows
in her column in The Global Citizen. She is director of
the Sustainability Institute and an adjunct professor of
environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
Well, some people don't want peace, they want a new
Star Wars project:
• The
Ballistic Missile Defence - BMD
Watch out, Reagan's old idea is back - to try to
protect the United States against incoming missile and
thus become able to launch an attack without being hit
back - is again being seriously considered. The Centre
for Defence Information and the Council
for a Liveable World has the relevant
links and articles.
And no wonder that wars continue around the world
at the turn of the century. Some profit from somebody's
elses death:
• Nothing
Can Stop U.S. Arms Sales
"One thing never changes in America's post-Cold War
foreign policy, and that is the awesome power of the U.S.
arms-exporting industries.
Over the past five years, no other nation comes close to
the United States as an arms exporter.
American sales from 1994 to 1998 added up to $53.9
billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute, which collects the statistics. In
second place was Russia with $12.3 billion in sales over
the five-year period, followed by France with $10.6
billion," writes Jim Mann in the San Jose Mercury
News.
This will make you think twice about globalization
- Zambia as a case:
• IMF
and the World Bank - Africa's Hidden
Killers?
"What if the IMF was to pack its bags and leave Zambia?
Do they imagine the situation would get worse for us?"
asks Emily Sikazwe. "What would they say if we took them
to the World Court in the Hague and accused them of
genocide?" Mark Lynas, editor of the fantastic supersite
OneWorld, offer the hard evidence in his empathetic
report.
There are ever more signs that the honeymoon
between the West/KFOR and the Kosovo-Albanians is over.
Here is an example - but this article, like many others,
does not raise the question why KFOR, the UN and all the
police seem helpless in keeping law and order four months
after they arrived. Is it the presence of some 70.000
internationals with high salaries that attract maffia
groups?
• Increasing
Crime in Kosovo
Pristina has turned into an Eldorado for different
criminal activities. Muscling people from their homes is
a lucrative activity in a city where a huge influx of
refugees has nearly doubled the original population of
280,000. And then there is the other crime -
intimidation, occupation of flats, harassment of
minorities, plus thefts, car thefts. And two to four
people a week dead in Pristina. Confidential records for
October show more than 200 crimes a week, including
murder, kidnapping, arson and burglaries, registered with
U.N. police &emdash; most unsolved. Many hundreds more
are unreported. Some of the violence remains ethnically
based. Much of it is committed by Albanians targeting the
dwindling Serb minority in revenge. Increasingly,
however, crimes &emdash; capital or otherwise &emdash;
are driven by the profit motive. In a city where few
people have jobs, crime is a way of survival - writes
Associated Press from Pristina on October 18.
• BBC's
Special Report on Rebuilding the
Balkans
This site contains many links and articles on various
aspects of this tremendously complex and
resource-demanding task. Among them is Dr. Jonathan
Eyal's comment on what money can - and cannot - bring
to the region.
But what do we do if the UN and NATO missions are
already failures?
• Annan
warns U.N. Mission in Kosovo risks being seen as
'occupation'
The UN SG, Kofi Annan, said the United States and its
European allies, while eager to finance the war against
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, had been less
generous with money for reconstruction. So far, he said,
they have provided only $35 million of a projected $125
million budget. And the S-G is afraid the UN could look
like an occupier in Kosovo. He has good reasons.
Have you wondered what happened to the genocide in
Kosovo that justified NATO's bombing campaign? Here
follows a critical analysis from Stratfor.com:
• Evidence
of Genocide Has Not Come Out of Kosovo
Yet.
"During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO
argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder;
official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic
Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic
cleansing. Yet four months into an international
investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have
been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200. Piecing
together the evidence, it appears that the number of
civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was
claimed. While new findings could invalidate this view,
evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the
scale used to justify the war. This could have serious
foreign policy and political implications for NATO and
alliance governments," writes Stratfor - which
also has a nice collection of Western statements
concerning
genocide.
And where is Montenegro heading?
• "Montenegrins
See Split with Serbia"
"With its economy spinning toward disaster, tiny
Montenegro is close to taking one more formal step toward
independence from Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia: the
establishment of its own currency," writes Steven
Erlanger in New York Times of October 18.
There are signs that a new Cold War-like conflict
formation is developing. Here is one of them:
• New
Types of Non-Military Weapons in the Chinese
Arsenal?
Senior members of the People's Liberation Army are openly
urging the Beijing government to abandon conventional
defence strategies and prepare a "dirty war". They
advocate terrorism, biochemical warfare, environmental
damage and computer viruses as a means to pitch the West
into political and economic crisis. Daily Telegraph's
David Harrison and Damien McElroy have read some Chinese
studies and speculate.
WIRE Editor
Jan Oberg with TFF
Associates
