Modern Deterrents

Watching today's young Japanese students push their desks to the side of the room and hide under them, as teachers pull shades over the windows to deflect flying glass, only reminds us this was a procedure that couldn't protect populations from nuclear attacks in the 1950s. Strategies designed to protect a retaliatory second strike weapon system after an initial surprise bombing in the 1960s are out-of-date as well.

     Nuclear-equipped enemies in the 21st century include minor nations and possible terrorist groups that have nothing to lose. Major players have cyber soldiers that don't move on their stomachs. They keep coming without food or sleep. Not only nuclear fallout can contaminate an environment, but climate change and asteroid collisions with Earth also threaten the world's food supply.

     We are seeing people taking survival into their own hands. One of the characters on "Orange is the New Black" represents those families who prepare their own caves with guns and a stockpile of food and water. Refugees already begin walking or taking to the sea in leaking boats and rafts to escape war-torn areas. Farmers are developing cross-breeding for livestock and hydroponic and aquaponic growing methods to produce food in new ways.

     Computer hacking and nanotechnology offer new defensive options for compromising the performance of all sorts of enemy systems. Enemies know how each others guidance systems work. Besides shooting nuclear ICBMs out of the sky and scattering radioactive particles over the Earth, redirecting ICBMs (and any enemy weapons) to strike whoever launched them has the potential to transform MAD (mutually assured destruction) into SAD (self assured destruction) and cause the most fearsome tyrant to try to scamper for a submarine.

     Programmers already send drones to destroy targets as small as individuals. There are "Hurt Locker" experts who disable bombs on land. Could drones disable nuclear missiles in space? In films, astronauts also keep asteroids from hitting Earth, and furry little forest creatures cause oncoming cyber soldiers to crash by tangling their legs in vines. Meanwhile, high-tech Star Wars airmen penetrate fortresses through air supply vents.

      In the past, shields have blocked arrows, gun powder reduced castle walls to rubble, tanks swept around the Maginot Line, and an armada of fishing boats rescued an army, while prayer and repentance saved Nineveh from destruction. Alliances change from century to century, but the darkness of night, fog, snow, and a blinding sunrise still have the power to deter an effective military response.

     The wise expect an unending race between offense and defense and use their smarts to triumph.

Venezuela Shows Need to Beware of Government Actions during Crises

Due in part to conflict erupting during an ongoing economic crisis, the first baseball player from Venezuela to be inducted into Cooperstown's Hall of Fame was absent from the ceremony honoring past greats at this year's All Star Game. Luis Aparicio, the celebrated, base-stealing Major League shortstop who lives in Maracaibo, is just one of the Venezuelans who has been affected by the food and medicine shortages caused by the world's falling oil prices that used to finance the country's economy.

     Street sit-downs by citizens, barricades set on fire by masked young men, and public rosary-praying by members of religious orders have led Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro to:

1. Send Venezuela's National Guard troops to fire tear gas into protesters from highway overpasses,
2. Postpone regional elections, 
3. Support the Supreme Court's attempt to strip the National Assembly of its powers.

     In her new book, No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein recounts case after case where governments have used crises to blame scapegoats and to impose measures they have been longing to enact. Fear and confusion enable governments to get away with actions that would be unthinkable in normal times. But whether its economic collapse, natural disasters, election fraud, war, or cyber attack, there's no clear choice between the powers a government needs to deal with a problem and those the government has been looking for an opportunity to grab.

     During wars, history shows the United States passed Alien and Sedition Laws to deport or imprison male subjects of enemy countries and to punish those who published anti-government material; suspended habeus corpus which requires persons to be lawfully charged with a crime before they are detained; and sent Japanese citizens to internment camps.

     Just as governments may be ready to cut funding for education and Social Security to fund a military buildup, to muzzle the press, or to increase surveillance during a crisis, the public needs to be ready to come together to support voting rights, to defend the independence of courts, to demand constitutional guarantees, and, most of all, with a fierce determination not to repeat mistakes of the past. Will citizens be up to the task of discerning which powers a government needs for the crisis at hand?

Soft Power

What changes minds, governments, behavior? The idea that a trainer can get a horse to do something by using a carrot that rewards or a stick that hurts translates into soft power and hard power. In international relations, hard power takes the form of tanks, bombs, drones, assassinations, prison sentences, torture, and economic sanctions. Soft power can defeat an enemy without firing a shot or sending anyone to a dungeon.

     Young men from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, began kicking a soccer ball around in Andahuaylillas, Peru. Children heard the familiar sound and joined them. Adults came to watch and some also joined the game. The Loyola students were in a program exploring the way sports can be used as a means of youth and community development. Communities determined to prevent gangs from destructive activity during summer vacations can beef up policing and arrests or they can work with businesses to provide summer jobs and with parks to leave the lights on for midnight basketball games.

     Why were a female music group, a Ukrainian filmmaker, and a blogger sent to Russian prisons and penal colonies? Why are Hong Kong book sellers in Chinese prisons? Authoritarian states recognize the soft power of music, film, social media, and books to overthrow repressive governments.

     Fashion, video games, educational systems like Montessori or Suzuki, and ethnic foods also spread values and cultural influence.

     Of the millions of people who have visited Disney theme parks, few have noticed the employees dressed as costumed characters when they enter or exit the park. The doors they used are in dim, uninviting alcoves away from the fun, excitement, and bright lights designed to entertain visitors.

     The bottom line is: recognize the impact, influence, and power of soft power.

(You can find additional information about the influence of films and soft power in the earlier posts: "You Oughta Be in Pictures" and "What Moscow Could Learn from History."

   

The Next War?

Throw out traditional texts on military strategy, if you count cyberwarfare which already has begun and the war envisioned by the February, 2016 Munich Security Conference.

   The Munich Conference expects future wars will engage killer robots with GPS guidance systems, facial-recognition technology, and artificial intelligence that wouldn't get tired, scared, or hungry and wouldn't retreat. Some suggest these robots would be less dangerous and more precise than land mines or nuclear bombs.

      But others warn that the same hackers who can alter data in electrical grids, hospitals, and financial markets could disrupt what military robots will do. Also, hackers could disrupt the so-called Internet of Things (IoT): cars, elevators, thermostats, refrigerators and other appliances that are directed by smart chips. For example, they could turn the IoT into spies on enemies.

Nuclear Straight Talk

We talk casually about nuking our lunches until the remains of a bird or cat are found in a microwave oven. However small the amount, until the lingering radiation from the 2011 meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan was measured on the West Coast of the United States in 2015, proponents lauded energy from nuclear power plants as clean compared to that from fossil fuels.

     Ever since the first atomic bombs killed over 100,000 almost instantly and another 90,000 to 140,000 from radiation in Japan seventy years ago, world leaders have both worked to eliminate death and destruction from atomic and hydrogen bombs and worked to acquire these weapons. While it is tempting to walk away from exasperating talks with an Iran or North Korea, the need to stave off a nuclear attack or Chernobyl-type accident demands persistence at the negotiating table.

     The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by Iran, five permanent members of the UN's Security Council, and Germany on July 14, 2015, aims to prevent Iran from enriching uranium at Natanz and from developing a bomb at its nuclear facility at Qom. The unanimous UN Security Council approval of sanctions on Kim Jong-un's North Korea on March 2, 2016 were designed to cut off financing for Pyongyang's nuclear and missile program. Yet "artificial seismic waves" detected at North Korea's Punggye-ri atomic test site caused a 5.0 magnitude earthquake on September 9, 2016. , Despite past cyber attacks that have caused North Korea's missile launch software to fail, in March, 2017, the country successfully launched four missiles that threatened Japan and claimed it had the west coast of the United States in its sights. In July, 2017, North Korea launched a long-range missile that made good on its claim. In addition to increasing the range of its weapon-carrying missiles, North Korea is working on mobile and submarine launchers that make it more difficult to detect pending missile tests/attacks.

      It might be wise to monitor travel from Iran to North Korea and back to make sure Iran is not using North Korea as a proxy to get around its agreement to discontinue its nuclear program. After all, Iran financed the transfer of North Korean nuclear technology to al-Kibar, Syria, where an Israeli air strike attacked Syria's nuclear reactor in September, 2007.

     At the website nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap, students can select target cities and see the widespread effect, in terms of casualties and radioactive fallout, of various atomic and nuclear weapons.

     In an article in the Novembver, 2015 issue of the alumni magazine of American University in Washington, DC, Koko Kondo, an atomic bomb survivor known as a hibakusha in Japanese, described the human suffering caused by the first mid-air detonation of an atomic bomb. With nine nuclear states (USA, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, Israel) and the forty countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have the capability to develop nuclear weapons, Kondo knows how important it is to abolish all nuclear weapons.

     When President Obama came to Hiroshina on May 27, 2016, he laid a wreath at the Peace Memorial and said, "the voices of hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness....But memory...fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change."

     Kondo's memory of the August, 1945 attack starts with seeing a blueish-white flash and the collapse of a building on top of her. There were fires everywhere. People were staggering around holding fists full of charred skin, and their hair was standing straight up. The eyeballs of those looking at the sky when the bomb detonated melted.

     Speaking at the memorial service in Hiroshima's Peace Park on August 6, 2015, the mayor urged, "People of the world...contemplate the nuclear problem as your own."

On War

War is scary for everyone, but especially for children who grow up scurrying for shelter when they hear air raid sirens, seeing buildings collapse, and suffering the loss of their own legs or parents. It also is scary when children can't walk or take a bus to school, walk through their neighborhoods, use a washroom, take an elevator, or check the Internet without worrying that a bully will block their way, punch them, steal their possessions, abuse them in social media, or shoot them. As General Sherman observed during the War between the States, "War is hell."

Would that everyone would take to heart the line of a song that says, "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me."

The Society of Friends, known as Quakers, does take this line seriously and members refuse to fight in any war. Others recognize a variety of motivations that justify war as a proportional response to injustice. A country invaded by another country needs to defend itself and protect its citizens. A race of people threatened with extinction should fight to survive. Less justifiable, a strongman decides to take what he wants from the weak. Believers in one religion or way of life seek converts by force.

The spectrum of conflict stretches from diplomacy to economic sanctions to nuclear war. Luke writes in the New Testament about a king who, before going to war against another king, sits down with his counselors and decides if he can defeat twenty thousand with his force of ten thousand. Deciding he can't, he sends a diplomat to offer terms of peace, while the enemy is "a great way off." Other strategists suggest offering an enemy a "golden bridge," a way to save face without going to war. Between World War I and World War II, some believed the pressure of public opinion could keep warmongers in check. Others argue that weakness creates a vacuum that the strong are eager to exploit. And still others observe that an arms race can set off a war not only by choice but even by chance.

We've seen a variety of conflict methods used against and by the United States in recent years.
There was the surprise attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. A diversion enabled troops to enter Osama bin Laden's compound and kill him. Informers were paid to lead the Special Forces that captured Saddam Hussein. Bombs have been carried on and brought down civil aircrafts. New weapons, drones, have been developed to target enemies.

Children think about war, as we know, when we ask them to draw pictures about their feelings. It's always time to talk to youngsters about the importance of respecting others the way they want to be respected, the importance of standing up for themselves, and the importance of praying for peace.

Young Voices

For 90 years, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards have recognized the outstanding ways students in grades seven through twelve have expressed their views of the world. When my granddaughter won a gold key this year for her modern fable about the consequences of a wolf's deception, I had an opportunity to look through the book of submissions from last year's winners that she received.

     With World Creativity and Innovation Week coming up April 15-21, this might be a good time for parents and teachers to encourage children and students to think about the world and compare what they draw and say with some of the representations and comments of Scholastic Art and Writing Award winners.

     One student disputed the stereotypes of color: yellow Asians, black Africans, brown Indians, and white Americans. She saw herself in many colors.

     World hunger was a topic that came up in several essays. A girl who wrote about villages where people "are skin and bones, their ribs visible" and their eyes always sad ended by saying that she never stops praying that, like "a blade of grass," these villagers can be "new and fresh." But a young immigrant from Laos who is a waitress in a bowling alley looks at American children in wonder when they "swallow between rounds" of arcade games and "drop food on the floor."

     Boys think about war. One made a sculpture showing a young man being persuaded to enlist in the Army. Another wrote about depth charges attacking a U-boat in World War II. A poet whose entry went from boy to old man included a stanza about being "a soldier with the callused heart mindlessly...following orders and longing for a purpose."

     Religion was a subject covered in art and word. Monks and Hindu statues caught the eyes of young photographers. One student looked at Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam and decided it was possible to start a world religion by deciding whom to exclude and what beliefs were contrary to the status quo.

     There were a number of unsettling dystopian views of the future. Meat and gems could not save a boy from a rare fever, and, when everything was plastic, only an old worn blanket could hold memories.

     For information about how students can share their voices with other young people and adults next year, login to artandwriting.org later this year.