The Hoosier Gadfly

In a generally insightful and timely article appearing in Slate, journalist and defense policy expert Fred Kaplan debunks “the nutty theory that Iranian nukes are a good thing.” He echoes some of the arguments I’ve offered over the several years this blog has been in existence. Kaplan, however, errs later in his article when he claims that we have a reasonable amount of time between now and when Iran can amass enough weapons grade U-235 for a bomb that it can fit inside a reentry vehicle on top of a missile.

To support his claim, Kaplan references this Spring, 2008 paper by Alexander Glaser to assert:

…[O]nce they’ve enriched their uranium to the level of 20 percent - it will take a year or more to enrich it further to the 80 percent or 90 percent needed to build bombs.

This is a gross oversimplification, probably derived from Glaser’s concluding section, which states:

The results based on the cascade simulations predict that more than 100 kg of weapon-grade HEU can be produced in one year with 3.5%-preenriched material and a capacity of 5000 SWU/yr, which is equivalent to about 2000 P1-type machines.

Let’s parse Glaser’s conclusion. Iran today is known to have at least 6,000 P1-type centrifuges, not 2,000 (the 2000 was probably a reasonable number nearly 3 years ago when the article was written), and the amount of material needed for a single nuclear weapon is considerably less than 100 kg. How much less? I addressed this in When will Israel attack?, from May 2009:

Using a neutron reflector (like beryllium) along with implosion, a much smaller amount of U-235 is needed for a critical mass than with a gun design and no neutron reflector. This is less than 20 kg, at high enrichment levels.

If we put this information together using Glaser as our source, it means that 2,000 P1 centrifuges can produce 5 small tactical nukes in one year starting with low-enriched uranium (LEU) feedstock. Moreover, now that Iran has 3 times that number of centrifuges, if it has enough LEU, it could produce 15/year. That amounts to one tactical nuke in a little less than a month or one strategic nuke in just over a month.

Glaser’s very detailed analysis on separative work and the capabilities of the P1 centrifuge essentially validates the back-of-the-envelop analysis I gave in When will Israel attack?:

To get from natural uranium to 95% enriched, bomb grade uranium (known as high enriched uranium – HEU) takes 6.14424 tSW. To take the same amount of natural uranium to 3.8% enrichment (known as low enriched uranium – LEU) requires 3.97689 tSW. Most of the work (around 64%) expended is to get from 0.711% to 3.8%. With 6,000 or so centrifuges running at max efficiency, it should take only a few weeks to go from 3.8% to 95%.

The fact is that a correct reading of Glaser validates my “threshold” or “breakout” argument.:

So long as the centrifuge operation and LEU UF₆ stockpile are compliant with IAEA safeguards, there is no “immediate” threat, or so the argument against preemption goes. Militating against this is the speed with which the first bomb can be produced – a few weeks if the Natanz facility is converted to bomb making.

Q.E.D.

So, if Glaser (Kaplan’s source) and I are right about Iran’s potential to rapidly produce enough material for nuclear weapons, why has there been no preemption? Kaplan says:

…[I]f they get to that point [of having enough material for a bomb], it’s another matter still to turn the material into bombs and then to fashion and miniaturize the bomb to fit onto a missile. This is rocket science.

To which I would add that it is over fifty-year-old “rocket science”. It is “rocket science” that, as reported several years ago by Jane’s, is based upon proven Soviet reentry vehicle (RV) designs suitable for a 1 MT warhead. Moreover, there is very good evidence that Iran has already tested an implosion design that goes far beyond the crude, first generation “laptop” design. Given all of this, it is reasonable to assume that when Iran produces its first weapon it will almost certainly be a 1 megaton device that can be carried in its redesigned Soviet-era warhead.

Iran has thus far played the international game brilliantly, aided by the foreign policy ineptitude of what Charles Krauthammer has called the “clownish” Obama administration. Contrary to Kaplan, there is very little time to deliberate on what to do about Iran. In any case, the only country with the will and capability to take out Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, so a discussion of what the international community together or the U.S. alone will do is moot. The real question is, what is the Israeli government waiting for?

After posting my review of Avatar, I went to the IMDB site and participated in some of the discussions there. While perusing the various threads, I came upon The Tet Zoo guide to the creatures of Avatar by a zoologist/writer named Darren Naish. He published his observations on Avatar the same day I did mine. Naish had “been reading up on the movie for months” – something I had not – and that, along with his knowledge of zoology, led him to comment on the exobiological aspects of the movie. I’m pleased to say that he and I are largely in agreement. In particular, we agree on the problems associated with the humanoid Na’vi:

Finally, the creatures that feature most strongly in the movie are of course the blue humanoid Na’vi. In many ways these are the easiest of the creatures to criticise, if - that is - you’re like me and think that the odds of human-like creatures evolving independently of us are vanishingly small and downright improbable. On the one hand, you can argue that successful alien films can work fine when the creatures don’t look at all human. And - given that humans are meant to be remotely piloting genetically modified Na’vi bodies - it wouldn’t have mattered to the story what the Na’vi looked like.

On the other hand, this movie is about warfare between cultures, about allegiances, and - I suppose - about cool-looking shit, so it figures that good looking ‘people’ need to feature large in the story. Originally, the Na’vi were going to look weirder, with gills, fins and other structures, but over time they were made to look more human simply to appeal more to the audience. Female Na’vi have breasts, specifically for this reason, apparently. So, yeah, the Na’vi are nothing more than attractive, semi-naked blue people with cat-like features… let’s let it go.

I, however, can’t let it go because, as I’ve stated in my review, If Cameron wants to give us a “science fact” background for his story and not a fantasy-based space opera then that it how Avatar must be judged: on the consistency of the science. I think my explanation that the humanoid features and expression were the result of a crash breeding program is the uniquely rational answer. If the Na’vi were modified through a ruthless culling/breeding program, it gives us an insight into how the global brain manages its environment and how it would likely modify its sentient bio-robots so as to better study the aliens who had arrived. I’m close to 100% certain that Cameron will never acknowledge the problem of the Na’vi – I give zero probability that he’ll ever explore the motivations of the global brain. Too bad, because the global brain is potentially the most interesting character of all.

Introduction

I saw Titanic on opening day, 19 December 1997 – my birthday. The movie immediately generated a welter of discussion among critics and cineastes alike. I eventually weighed in with my own “quasi-review”, which I posted on the discussion group “rec.arts.movies.current-films”. The review was titled “TITANIC: Some Reflections”

James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, came out one day shy of 12 years after the release of Titanic. Now that I’ve seen it (twice) and had a chance to ruminate on the experience, it is fitting that I produce another quasi-review.

At the outset, I must say that as a long-time fan of Cameron’s cinematic oeuvre, there are aspects of Avatar that challenge me. There is a political and philosophical thrust to the movie that is most uncongenial to my world view. I beg the reader’s indulgence while I explain.

There is wide agreement among commentators that the movie offers up good “tree hugger” aliens who are pitted against the lackeys of an evil corporation. Said corporation is raping the edenic moon Pandora for a miraculous substance called “unobtainium”, which possesses unexplained but extremely valuable properties that fetch $20 million a kilo in 2154 dollars. (We are to assume that $20 million is a lot of money but, given the likely inflation rate post-Obama, I figure a loaf of bread in 2154 will probably cost $10 million. More realistically, assuming we maintain an average inflation rate of 3% over the next 144 years, that’s roughly $275K in uninflated 2009/2010 dollars. The current market price of platinum is $1.5K/ounce – that translates to $52.9K/kg. So figure unobtainium is around 5 times more valuable than platinum. Not hugely expensive given a trip of several light years in the RDA corporation’s private starship is required to “obtain” it. But I digress.) Unobtainium is the classic Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” – the thing that provides the raison d’être for the action. All of the humans on Pandora work for the RDA corporation and RDA seeks the riches that unobtainium will bring. The aboriginals, who live in complete harmony with the flora and fauna of Pandora, have no interest in unobtainium – there is no indication they have any idea that it exists.

Commentators who love the movie see it as a science fiction rendering of our own history: Western Civilization expanding at the expense of aboriginals who are our spiritual betters. Commentators who hate the movie see it as PC, anti-Western, revisionist history melded with populist demagoguery and “deep green” environmentalism.

I would naturally incline to the latter view. The “tree hugger” philosophy of the aliens is the purest deep green dogma. I call this dogma eco-fascism (see Democrats are responsible for Global Warming or Goose Pond: an environmental hazard? for some examples of my thinking on the subject). Eco-fascism is unquestionably the most dangerous dogma the world has ever seen: it effectively proselytizes; it has inextricably entangled itself with most Western governments; it is neo-Luddite, neo-Malthusian, neo-Pagan, collectivist, and is virulently anti-human.

Cameron intends for us to identify with the aliens, not the humans. He does this by offering up the Rousseauian ideal of the “noble savage”, a pernicious fiction that remains very popular in the halls of academe and is part of the regular social studies curriculum throughout the public school system. I have an undergraduate degree in sociology and a life-long interest in anthropology so this is a subject about which I have some knowledge. Moreover, I’ve discovered over the intervening years that much of what I learned in college was just plain wrong. (Apropos of which, I’d recommend Nicholas Wade’s book
Before the Dawn, as a good lay person’s overview of the current state of anthropology, paleoanthropology, and genetics.)

One idea in anthropology I never embraced, even as an undergraduate, was cultural relativism: that all cultures are equal; none is better than any other. I always maintained that the essence of Western Civilization is correct – that the scientific method, reason, and the celebration of the individual are superior to every alternative. This put me at odds with my fellow students – I was always being drawn into arguments because I took the side of Western science and reason over folk “wisdom”.

In order to make it easy for the audience to identify with the aboriginals, Cameron makes them explicitly humanoid – they are so humanoid in fact that they really don’t fit in with the apparent evolutionary history of Pandora. I’ll have more to say on this in due course.

Returning now to reviewing the movie, I agree with critics that Avatar can be seen as “Dances With Wolves in space” though that is not, in and of itself, a negative for me. I enjoyed Dances With Wolves and I think Cameron’s exploration of similar themes in a work of science fiction was handled well. For me, eco-fascism was a trope too far. Cameron has publically and unabashedly acknowledged that the movie is intended to convey a strong environmentalist message, as can be seen in the following interview excerpt.

Well, I think that obviously there’s a connection to recent events, and there’s a conscious attempt to evoke even Vietnam era imagery, with the way the guys jump off the helicopters and so on. It’s a way of connecting a thread through history. I take that thread farther back, and I sure like to have a little historical memory that goes back farther than that to the 17th, 16th centuries and how the Europeans pretty much took over South, Central and North America and displaced and marginalised the indigenous peoples there. And I think there’s this long wonderful history of the human race written in blood, going back as far as we can remember. And the Roman Empire, and even farther back. We had a tendency to just take what we want without asking, as Jake says. I see that as a broader metaphor, not as intensely politicised as some people would make it. Broader in the sense that that is how we treat the natural world.

There’s a sense of entitlement - we’re here, we’re big, we’ve got the guns, we’ve got the technology, we’ve got the brains, therefore we’re entitled to every damn thing on this planet. And that’s not how it works, and we’re going to find out the hard way if we don’t wise up and start seeking a life that’s in balance with the natural cycles of life on Earth. And this is the challenge that’s before us. And I think that, certainly, the film espouses this love-hate relationship with technology.

Obviously, we used technology to tell the story that’s a celebration of nature, which is an irony in and of itself, but I think that it’s not that technology is bad, it’s not that a technological civilisation is bad, it’s that we have to be in control of our technical process. We’re not going to be able to rip our clothes off and go back into the wilderness. First of all there’s not a whole lot of it left, secondly that’s not going to work for 8 billion people. So we’re going to have to think our way out of this, and we’re going to have to do it using technology, using science, but we’re also going to have to be very, very human about it, and get in touch with our emotions and our understanding of each other. One of the themes of the film, I think, is symbolised by the fact that it begins and ends with the character’s eyes opening. It’s about a change of perception, and about choices that are made once our perceptions change.

Is that it? Is Cameron acknowledging that Avatar is largely environmentalist (that is, eco-fascist) propaganda? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. As is usually the case with Cameron, Avatar is multi-layered and many of these layers (colonialism, environmentalism) are intentional. More intriguing are layers that must be unintentional because they are subversive of his surface message. The observation that artists may not be aware of all of the themes that appear in their work is hardly novel. Isaac Asimov recounted an experience he had attending a lecture where some of his stories were being analyzed. Afterwards, he approached the lecturer to offer corrections to some of the latter’s analysis. After listening patiently to Dr. Asimov’s critique, the lecturer responded something along the lines of, “That’s very interesting – but tell me, what makes you think that because you wrote the story, you know anything about it?”

What I propose to do in the balance of this review is to probe the thematic depths of Cameron’s Avatar - of the story he put on the screen. I’ll analyze areas that critics, both favorable and unfavorable, have missed. I’ll also examine other elements that are present that make the movie much more interesting and complex but in a way that Cameron likely didn’t intend.

Creating Pandora

Cameron’s vision of Pandora is alone worth the price of admission. And, to his credit, Cameron presents it largely as is – there are none of the long explications typical in science fiction movies. If one is paying close attention Cameron gives us enough information to develop a general idea of the physical parameters of Pandora: one character mentions that Pandora has lower gravity and another that it has a thicker atmosphere than Earth. We know the atmosphere is poisonous to humans but we see that it does support combustion so it is oxygen rich. (What makes it poisonous? No explanation is given, though I’d guess a lethally high CO₂ level. Why would there be high CO₂ given a global jungle? Pandora, being the moon of a gas giant, experiences tidal heating and a high level of volcanism, which produces lots of CO₂.) The low gravity and thick atmosphere make the gigantic flying creatures that can be ridden by the humanoids – the Na’vi – scientifically possible.

The flora and fauna on Pandora seem to have elements of an aquatic and terrestrial environment – think coral reef and rain forest. We never see any marine life though we know Pandora has oceans from the scenes of the RDA starship approaching and going into orbit around the moon. With the exception of the Na’vi, all animal life seems to have evolved from a common hexapod ancestor. The Na’vi are the only species we see having four limbs, though in an early scene we are shown some arboreal lemur-like creatures whose arms bifurcate at the elbow. I suspect that Cameron gave us the shot of the lemurs to explain the Na’vi. If the lemurs and Na’vi share a common, arboreal ancestor, it makes sense that brachiation would tend to select for two, rather than four, arms. The lemurs represent the branch that didn’t fully develop brachiation and, hence, have retained a partial hexapod configuration.

Support for my observation that the lemurs are intended to show how the four-limbed Na’vi might have evolved is found when the pack of hyena-like creatures attack protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Cameron gives us a close-up of the feet of one of the creatures and we observe that rather than paws, it has something more like an ape’s hands but with three fingers and a thumb. Na’vi hands, of course, follow the same model: three fingers and a thumb. (In a nice touch, the human-Na’vi hybrid avatars have four fingers and a thumb – alien features obvious to a Na’vi. From dialogue we learn avatars also have a distinctive smell.)

The most interesting life form on Pandora is the tree network, which constitutes a global brain. We get our first hints that the trees communicate when Sully provides armed escort for exo-biologist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and her assistant, Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) – all in their avatar bodies. We see Augustine and Spellman tapping in to some of the connections between trees, commenting on the electrical current flow. In time, we learn that the individual trees form quadrillions of interconnections – 10¹² trees with 10⁴ connections per tree. Functionally, the trees are a single giant brain – a hard science version of Stanislaw Lem’s planetary brain in Solaris (made into a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky). All of the complex animal life that we see in the movie has twin bio-ethernet connectors with the exception of the Na’vi, who have only one “cable” that first appears to be a single, long braided pigtail. The Na’vi use their cable to “bond” with their hexapod horses and the flying “banshees” in order to control and ride them. The Na’vi also connect directly to tree nodes. When Jake does this, we learn that “dead” Na’vi have been uploaded into the planetary brain and, apparently, exist. The form of the existence is not explained – we don’t know whether the dead exist as static recordings of memories or dynamic, self-aware entities.

Gaia versus Pandora

James Lovelock proposed what he called the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970’s. In his view, all life on Earth effectively functions to maintain a planetary homeostasis that is favorable to life’s continued existence. For example, our oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is not stable. Free oxygen would never exist were it not being continually replenished by living organisms (photosynthetic plants). Lovelock concluded that one could think of the Earth as a single living organism. In subsequent years, and to the consternation of Lovelock, the Gaia Hypothesis began to take on a religious tenor with eco-fascist acolytes treating it as literally true – as Gaia being the spirit of a living world.

In Avatar, the term “tree hugger” is used several times by characters as an epithet. Tree huggers would be Gaia-worshipping eco-fascists. The Na’vi act and sound like such people and so the humans (who Cameron portrays as ignorant racists) naturally assume that they are contending with a belief system akin to Gaia-worship that makes the Na’vi uncooperative. In the course of the movie, we learn that what is a belief system on Earth is reality on Pandora. The moon Pandora is the living being Pandora.

Pandora as a character

Like the Pandoran ecology, which Cameron only shows but never explains, we learn about Pandora primarily by observing what it does. Grace Augustine delivers a couple of lines late in the movie indicating that the tree system is a biological internet more complex than the human brain although she never articulates that it actually is a brain. The Na’vi princess, Neytiri (Soe Saldana), says that the god – Pandora - only maintains the balance of nature. It never intervenes directly. Yet, when she says that we have already had hints that she is wrong.

We are first introduced to Pandora, though we don’t know it at the time, when one of the flying seeds of the home tree lands on Neytiri’s arrow as she prepares to shoot and kill Sully. She interprets this “sign” as being the home tree god telling her to spare Sully’s life. Of course, that is exactly what Pandora is saying. Shortly thereafter, a large number of seeds descend upon Sully, cover him for a few moments, and then fly away. For Neytiri, this “sign” is unmistakable – the tree god has chosen Sully in some fashion and she is now committed to taking Sully to the tribe and to her mother, Moat (C C H Pounder), the tribal shaman and interpreter of “signs”.

There is only one other instance of clear, purposive behavior from Pandora and that is during the climactic battle when the animals are sent to attack the humans. At this point, we can now see the significance of the bio-ethernet connections on the various animals. They are used to communicate with Pandora. Information is not only uploaded from animals to Pandora, Pandora also downloads instructions – “programs” – for the animals to relentlessly attack humans and their machines. The animals function like biological unmanned combat robots that, once given their targets, operate in a wholly autonomous fashion.

Once again, Cameron has done a remarkable job with the biology. When Sully learns that the dead Na’vi live on in the tree network, he does so at a communication node. The nodes have a dense collection of long, bio-luminescent structures that give the appearance of a weeping willow fashioned from glowing strings of LED’s. This finally explains why animals have those bio-ethernet connectors – they are to communicate with Pandora. The “branches” of the node are passive receptors – any time an animal moves through branches or walks along the ground and brushes against them, there is a reflex in the animal that causes it to make a quick connection and download information into Pandora. It has to be a reflex because all the Na’vi have to do in order to “bond” with various animals is brush their braided connector against one of the target animal’s connectors. It’s easy to see how this arrangement could co-evolve once you have the beginnings of a network.

Returning to Pandora and its intentions and motivations, Cameron doesn’t provide us with any information other that what I’ve detailed above. However, we can draw some reasonable inferences. Pandora could be thought of as an infant genius – perhaps even an infant god, insofar as it is the literal brain of its world. As intelligent self-aware life begins to evolve, it provides Pandora with richer and more detailed observations or “reports” on its surroundings and, perhaps, the first awareness of a wider universe beyond itself. The gas giant around which Pandora orbits and the star around which everything orbits will be observed and reported on. The coming of the aliens – us – offers a whole new set of inputs. We know that there were early contacts between the Na’vi and humans – Grace Augustine has photos of the time when she was “educating” the Na’vi in our language and culture. However, like Solaris, Pandora was actually studying the humans. We know there was an initial period of cooperation, after which cooperation ended. Was this a choice made by the Na’vi while Pandora passively accepted data or did Pandora command the Na’vi to break off contact? I’d assume the latter.

I also assume that Pandora was actively involved in the ecology of Pandora. It had probably been engaging in selective breeding for millions of years – making sure that its biological agents were more reliable sources of data and with better, more responsive connectors. Predators could be programmed to go after prey with shorter connectors and spare prey with longer ones. The same sort of selection could be going on in mating, with the length of connectors being programmed as a preference.

This brings us back to a comment I made about the human-ness of the Na’vi. Even if we accept that four-limbed bipeds with mammalian features evolved naturally, without any direction from Pandora, the odds that most of the facial features as well as all of the facial expressions would be human are nothing less than astronomical. Such a creature evolving elsewhere in the universe, let alone within a few light years of Earth, is so improbable as to be functionally impossible. Of course, Cameron had this advanced motion capture technology that gave him accurate rendering of the human face. The humanoid alien who is an actor with appliances on his face is a staple of space opera and even hard science fiction audiences will accept this without question. The problem is that Cameron has given us a brilliantly conceived and largely consistent ecology and a completely plausible, naturally evolved global brain and then he throws utterly impossible humanoids into the mix. Cameron may or may not have decided that he wasn’t going to worry about this. However, there is one possible explanation that is available to Cameron to explain the Na’vi if there is a sequel: the Na’vi are the product of a crash selective breeding program initiated by Pandora!

We get hints that humans have known about Pandora for a long time. We learn that Sully grew up hearing about Pandora and its legendary floating mountains and he appears to be in his early 30’s. There are some other suggestions that indicate knowledge of Pandora goes back even farther. Late 21^st century explorations, starting with robotic probes and later humans, are consistent with what Cameron gives us. Neytiri tells Sully that there have been times of great trials in the past, notably five occasions when the “last shadow” flyer was tamed and ridden by heroes who united the tribes. What was going on? Perhaps Pandora was instituting a massive cull of the sentients in order to produce a more human version – a human version that would allow it to study the strange creatures that had suddenly appeared in its world.

If Pandora became aware of humans 70 or so years before the action of the movie there might be enough time to engineer human looking and behaving aboriginals if there are enough generations. One thing we don’t know about the Na’vi is their average lifespan and how long it takes them to reach breeding age. (Cameron may have offered us a clue in Grace Augustine’s photographs but unless I get the movie on Blu-ray and freeze frame the photos, I can’t say if this is the case.) In the movie we learn that the human-Na’vi hybrids grew to adulthood in their tanks over the nearly six years of the voyage from Earth. In and of itself, this tells us nothing of the average lifespan of the Na’vi – the growth period may have been a function of some process associated with making the body avatar-ready. There may have been purely logistical concerns – it’s simpler to keep the avatars in the tank rather than on life support or cryo-sleep. Still it may be a clue that Cameron even thought out this aspect of the ecology and of Pandora’s control over it.

Another look at the MacGuffin

I stated above that unobtainium was a MacGuffin. On the surface, that is exactly what it is: the thing that everybody wants – a plot contrivance that only serves to advance the plot. Typically, anything can be a MacGuffin. For example, in the noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly, the MacGuffin is a box that, when opened just a crack, emits a blinding light, accompanied by a sinister, guttural hiss. Everybody wants the box and it really doesn’t matter what’s in it. In the novel, the box contained heroin. In the movie, it was plutonium. The plot would have worked just as well with anything the audience would believe is valuable and that everybody wanted. (Note: Quintin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, like all of Tarantino’s movies, is replete with cinematic references. It’s pretty obvious that Marcellus Wallace’s glowing attaché case is a reference – Tarantino fans would say “homage” – to Kiss Me Deadly.)

As I’ve already demonstrated, the setting of Avatar is extremely detailed and very well thought out. It should come as no surprise that unobtainium is more than a mere MacGuffin.

When I saw the previews showing the floating mountains, I strongly suspected that this substance was a room temperature superconductor (RTS). In the scene in which Grace Augustine confronts executive Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), he says that her science project is financed by an undistinguished looking gray rock that he calls “unobtainium”. His small sample of unobtainium floats over a plate on his desk. Self-levitation! One of the key features of superconductivity! Q.E.D. Of course the stuff is valuable – that’s why the RDA corporation has established a mining operation on a hostile, inhabited moon nearly a six year starship journey from Earth.

Unobtainium may not exist on Earth but it seems to be everywhere on Pandora. The Hallelujah Mountains – the “flying” mountains – self-levitate. They clearly contain large amounts of the RTS. Even richer deposits (though it’s hard to imagine richer deposits than whole mountains of the stuff) of the RTS seem to be associated with the trees - in particular the home tree of the Na’vi tribe. This actually makes sense in terms of the role of the trees as super-neurons in Pandora’s brain. The root structure taps into the unobtainium and uses it to facilitate information/energy storage. It is the ubiquity of the RTS throughout the crust of Pandora that makes it possible to transfer information over vast distances with no energy loss. The RTS is an essential environmental element for the evolution of the global brain that is Pandora.

Jake Sully: seduced or programmed?

The similarities between Dance’s With Wolves and Avatar are, as previously stated, obvious. Cameron himself has acknowledged similarities. Both stories require that the journey of the protagonist from being a member of one culture to another is believable. Cameron gave himself a bigger challenge since Sully isn’t just joining another culture – he’s joining another species. I believe even the severest critics of Avatar would agree that Sully’s conversion works in the context of the story.

Sully’s journey from human to Na’vi begins the first time he controls his avatar. As a paraplegic whose prospects for a spinal repair are dependent upon pleasing his company superiors, suddenly inhabiting and exercising a healthy alien body is exhilarating. Sully charges out of the sealed building and into the Pandoran atmosphere – he bounds over obstacles and ends up in a garden of alien plants. He digs his alien feet into the alien soil and works it with his alien toes. Joy, bordering on ecstasy, plays across his alien but remarkably human face. Interestingly, at this moment, Sully encounters a smiling Grace Augustine in her own avatar, sporting a Stanford t-shirt. For the first time, Augustine treats him as something other than an annoying and unwelcome interloper foisted upon her by corporate politics.

The exhilaration of living in his avatar body continues on Sully’s first expedition into the Pandoran jungle, where he fills in as a door gunner on a VSTOL craft. This is the trip that leads to his first contact with Neytiri and the Na’vi. Sully is a military man and almost certainly an adrenalin junky so being accepted as a sort of apprentice Na’vi warrior is appealing. So is the chief’s daughter, who becomes his mentor-trainer. She’s human enough that being tall, blue, and with feline nose, ears, and tail simply makes her more exotically attractive. Being accepted by the Na’vi also raises Sully’s status with both Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the head of the RDA mercenary detachment, and with Selfridge. Even Grace Augustine is impressed. Sully for the first time receives a guarantee that he’ll “get his legs” when he completes his mission. Everything that Sully does in his avatar body nets him big rewards both in the human and Na’vi world.

Initially Sully see’s the Na’vi as “tree huggers” but that attitude changes over time as he starts to be accepted into the tribe. As he identifies more and more with the tribe, he experiences a growing confusion about which part of his life is “real”, as he reveals in his video log. Once he finally joins the tribe as a warrior, he is taken to the communication node where he links to Pandora and learns that the minds of the “dead” Na’vi, live on in the “tree”. After this he makes love with Neytiri and “goes native” – his conversion is complete and unwavering in all subsequent action.

I submit that there is another explanation for Sully’s total conversion that is perfectly consistent with the action, though I doubt it was intended by Cameron. When Sully links to Pandora, it programs him in much the same way it will later program animals to attack the humans. If he had divided loyalties before that moment, they are gone afterwards. Is programming necessary to explain any of Sully’s actions? Not at all. However, there is no reason to assume that Pandora is a benign god. It has its own motives and, as I’ve observed, it may well have done significant culling of the Na’vi in the past. I’m not suggesting that Pandora is the biological equivalent of Skynet but Cameron has left open the possibility of making Pandora a more significant and complex character in any sequels.

Cameron subverts his message

In Hollywood, two religions dominate: Scientology and Gaia-worshipping eco-fascism. Cameron belongs to the latter belief system. Cameron may have been captured a long time ago, though I didn’t see it in any of his movies. I’d guess that the long hiatus he took post-Titanic in which he indulged a passion for deep diving and exploration (probably awakened by making Titanic) brought him in contact with the eco-fascist ethos. Pity that Cameron didn’t spend as much time researching economics, energy, and natural resources as he did biology, when preparing the background for his narrative.

Such research could have started with economist Julian Simon (profiled here by the Cato Institute’s Stephen Moore in 1998). Simon’s most comprehensive and accessible work is The Ultimate Resource 2. The “ultimate resource” of the title is the 1.5 kilos of skull meat known as the human brain. Simon’s extensively researched book busts every myth animating eco-fascism. Cameron states “there’s not a whole lot of [nature] left”, which is patently false, as Simon shows. For example, the U.S. is more heavily forested today than it was 100 years ago. A case in point is the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), where I work. Today, Crane is nearly 100 square miles of forest, dotted with a few buildings where R&D and in-service engineering for the U.S. Navy take place. In the mid-1930’s this area was cleared farmland, with nary a tree in sight.

After Julian Simon, Cameron could have read The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg. After publication of this book, Lomborg was subjected to unremitting attack from eco-fascist zealots because he is that most evil of creatures: a heretic from the true religion. Lomborg remains an “environmentalist” (hence the title) but he rejects the dogma that has come to dominate environmentalism. Ironically, he took his first steps on the path to heresy when he attempted to debunk Simon. In looking at all of Simon’s supporting evidence, Lomborg found that it was his own position that was debunked.

Even though Cameron’s knowledge of humans and the environment is seriously deficient, he is too much of a technophile to be a true eco-fascist – one might say that he belongs to the Reform rather than the Orthodox Church of Gaia. This poses a problem for Cameron that a less meticulous movie maker would have avoided. Cameron invites us to believe that Pandora is possible, which he has done to an amazing degree by constructing a scientifically consistent ecology. He gets the behavior of RTS right and fits it into the story in an ingenious way that ties to the ecology. Even the starship is plausible insofar as it doesn’t obviously violate physics and, by implication, obeys relativity. The problem all of this creates is that it doesn’t comport with the idea of a world that is no longer green and is dying – the cautionary message Cameron puts in Sully’s mouth.

The first problem is that a civilization with starships – a “starfaring” civilization – cannot die unless it encounters a more advanced competitor that decides to eliminate it. Life that remains on Earth must perish at some point because the aging Sun will eventually kill it. More likely is that some celestial catastrophe – comet or meteor strike or cosmic ray burst - will kill everything down to or including bacteria. Gaia-worshipers celebrate an Earth without humans. They don’t even understand the full implications of their belief system. On those occasions when I’ve debated the Gaia-worshippers, I like to point out that human beings are Gaia’s nervous system – we are Gaia’s brain. Gaia evolved us for the specific purpose of saving life on Earth. We are the solution, not the problem. I said something similar in Yuri Gagarin Day!!

[C]osmic ray bursts are so common throughout the universe that they may be the best explanation for why there is no evidence of technologically advanced life besides us. Complex life (almost?) never lasts long enough to develop space travel before it is seared to extinction by lethal radiation. The animal rights loonies and eco-fascists, if they really love non-human life so much, should consider the fact that human beings really are the “paragon of animals” – only we humans can safeguard terrestrial life by spreading it throughout the solar system and beyond.

Cameron must understand at some level that a necessary component of saving life on Earth ultimately requires that humans leave the planet and take a sufficiently varied DNA library of organisms along to allow colonists to construct a terrestrial ecosphere somewhere else.

This brings us to problem number two. The power requirements to move one spacecraft over interstellar distances bespeaks such a mastery over energy production that there simply cannot be energy problems for terrestrial civilization. And the RDA starship cannot plausibly be a one-off: it is private and belongs to one corporation. Said corporation may well own several – we can reasonably expect that. But be assured that various governments around the world have even more advanced models – think of the difference between a modern cruise ship and a nuclear aircraft carrier (CVN). The energy conversion technology used in starships must be ubiquitous, ergo, there simply can’t be an energy crisis for terrestrial civilization in Avatar’s universe.

Problem number three relates to the first two in that what we see of science and technology is completely inconsistent with the neo-Malthusianism inherent in the statement about the dying Earth. Genetic engineering has advanced to such a level that human-alien hybrids are possible and yet it is impossible to save supposedly dying eco-systems? It beggars the imagination.

There is a clue that Cameron himself may not believe his own message. When Quaritch meets with Sully early on, he comments about fighting in Venezuela, describing it as bad (or tough – don’t recall the exact adjective) “bush” but nothing in comparison with Pandora. In military vernacular, “bush” would be jungle. Jungle is, by definition, “green”. Was Cameron just being sloppy? Or is “green” a relative term and “green” is slowly being eliminated on Earth though we know it still exists in Venezuela? I think Cameron meant the latter but that just creates more problems for him. If jungles still exist, expanding them becomes a much easier task. Of course, the fact remains that the natural world is not being destroyed by human beings – if anything, advanced civilization is good for “the environment” as Cameron would define the word.

Plot weaknesses or opportunities for a sequel

The implicit contradictions in the story brought about by the conflict between Cameron’s message and the technology in evidence I noted above. In this section I will enumerate explicit plot problems/holes that crop up where Cameron either fails to consider the clear implications of a plot element or decides that he’s just going to ignore them for the sake of his narrative.

In some cases, potential plot weaknesses in Avatar could actually be explained in a sequel and add more complexity to the story arc Cameron is supposedly pursuing. I will discuss those as well.

• The low-tech military - With the exception of single-stage-to-orbit shuttles and the powered walkers, none of the equipment used by the company military is more advanced than what the U.S. military currently employs. Arguably, it is all 1970’s or 1980’s technology at best – I say this as someone with roughly twenty years experience (off and on) as a Defense contractor and (now) civil servant for the U.S. Navy. Even a military with 2009/2010 capabilities could lose once Pandora unleashed its animal hordes but why not show it? A more reasonable battle would be to show all of the humans in special VR equipment controlling an attack force composed of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) and unmanned combat vehicles (UCVs) – early versions of these are already on the battlefield. No human would die in the battle with the Na’vi-Pandora force, though all of the remote combat vehicles would be quickly destroyed once Pandora hit with the animal shock troops. Of course, if the final battle doesn’t pit actual humans against the Na’vi, it isn’t as dramatic. It would also make it much more difficult to have a one-on-one battle between Sully and Quaritch. (Note: as I’ll discuss below, there is actually no need for any Na’vi or animals to die if RDA used non-lethal defensive technology.) So, Cameron sacrificed scientific/technological accuracy for dramatic effect. There is one possible explanation that might serve. The RDA corporation is doing security on the ultra-cheap. RDA underestimated what would be needed to deal with the threat and bought a bunch of 150+ year old war surplus equipment.

  I still question the low tech but, I’ll give Cameron this one.

• Unobtainium mining - we know that unobtainium is a naturally occurring mineral on Pandora. Whether it is five times, ten times, or even a hundred times the going rate of Platinum in 2154 (as I discussed above), the idea of value has no meaning unless unobtainium is being shipped back to Earth. There is no economy in any sense of the word on Pandora - there are no human colonists, just a company outpost. Besides, the ubiquity of unobtainium would mean that it would be a cheap commodity in the event Pandora is colonized. As Gary Cooper observes in the Western Garden of Evil, “[I]f the earth were made of gold, men would die for a handful of dirt.” Pandora is practically made of unobtainium – it’s as common as dirt. Earth, however, has none of it. This much is obvious. What is not obvious, however, is why it is necessary to ship unobtainium back to Earth. Given the technology, how can it possibly be cheaper to ship rocks X number of light-years back to Earth than it would be to analyze samples in situ and learn how to make it? Send the information from the mineral assay – unobtainium’s composition and crystalline structure – back to Earth as a stream of photons traveling at the speed of light. Once again, it beggars the imagination to assume that something nature creates in abundance can’t be duplicated by human science. If there is no need to mine unobtainium then the entire conflict that propels the eventual clash between humans and aboriginals – actually between humans and Pandora - disappears. A “rich” deposit is no more intrinsically valuable than a rock chipped off of one of the floating mountains because either can be assayed. Every explanation I can come up with for mining the stuff makes no sense as long as it is being sent back to Earth. It is economically and scientifically absurd. There is one explanation that Cameron might be able to use in a sequel: mining unobtainium is a cover for the real mission. If unobtainium is going to be used as a raw material for a future colonization wave, it could be used to jump start technological development on Pandora. There’s no need to make the stuff, just refine what is already there. If Grace Augustine was aware mining was a cover story it would validate Sully’s communication that an unending wave of humans was in the offing. Why would there be a need for a cover story? To steal a march on potential competitors? It appears that RDA managed to obtain some sort of monopoly on exploiting Pandora. Maybe the cover story was necessary to win a contract from some governmental entity. As a plot device in Avatar 2, it might work.
• Where are the computers? Where is the A.I.? - This problem relates to the first in the list and is, to my mind, the most serious. A “Moore generation” is the amount of time it has historically taken for integrated circuit manufacturers to double computer processor speed. That value is around two years per doubling. Concurrent with improvements in processors, massively parallel arrangements of processors plus improved algorithms increase the overall performance of computers. Currently the fastest supercomputers are capable of around 10¹⁵ operations per second. Assuming that we continue to have technological breakthroughs that allow us to sustain the current value of a Moore generation, then the increase in processor capability would be roughly 2⁷⁰ by the middle of the next century when the story takes place. That’s on the order of 10²¹ or a billion-trillion (sextillion) times current processor capabilities and that’s not even including parallel computing improvements. Lots of technical folks would argue (and I’m one of them) that we can’t maintain the pace of the doubling – that we’ll reach an inflexion point long before 140 years from now. So, let’s pick a more reasonable value and assume that we only get twenty more doublings. That’s still a million times current computing power. We should have something between “soft” and “hard” A.I., where “soft” describes computers that are semi-intelligent, semi-autonomous and “hard” describes computers that are fully self-aware. Even at the slowest possible development speed of computer and programming technology commensurate with the other technologies we do see – starships, genetic engineering, and remote bio-thought control – the human race would be on the threshold of realizing, by purely artificial means, what has evolved naturally on Pandora: a network capable of storing human minds and possibly even capable of self-awareness itself. Cameron has already told a version of that story in Terminator and Terminator 2 and probably didn’t want to deal with it here. Still, I think he should have done more to suggest that something along the lines of soft A.I. existed on Earth. The RDA outpost should have had some very sophisticated computers and robots around – write off the lack of robot warriors to bureaucratic stupidity and bean counting, which has to be a fundamental law of the universe.
• Darwin and Drake’s Equation - If there is complex, intelligent life (two! species) on Pandora, which is a close interstellar neighbor, Bayesian reasoning would suggest a high value for the Drake Equation, which offers a probability for technological civilizations being present at any given time. A high value would mean that there are probably a fairly large number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. In a crowded Galaxy, we can expect that contact between alien races will obey Darwinian laws. David Brin makes exactly that argument in Shouting at the Cosmos. In Brin’s view, actively broadcasting messages in hopes of making contact with alien civilizations rather than passive listening carries the risk that the race we contact, once aware of our existence, would see us as a rival to be eliminated and proceed to do so.

  Implicit in trying to contact alien intelligence are two assumptions: (1) they are benevolent and altruistic and (2) even if they aren’t, space travel over interstellar distances is so impractical as to be functionally impossible. Darwin tells us the first assumption is almost certainly wrong. A study of technologically feasible propulsion systems informs us that the second is probably wrong as well (see, for example these papers on antimatter catalyzed fission-fusion propulsion systems for extra-solar probes or VASIMR ion propulsion for an optimal Earth-Mars transit in 29 days!).

  Cameron has given us a future where (2) is wrong. Cameron also intends that we see Pandora and the Na’vi as benign – they certainly lack the technology in 2154 to be a threat. Perhaps in future episodes Cameron will offer up a “hopeful” story of Earth civilization “maturing” and become an eco-aware, benevolent and altruistic civilization because of our contact with Pandora. So, Cameron will implicitly assume that (1) is correct. That’s not the way to bet.

  Permit me to offer a modest proposal for the final two movies in a trilogy.

  Pandora, now that it has gained a huge amount of knowledge about cosmology, evolutionary theory, terrestrial biology, and human history from the mind of Grace Augustine, decides that it needs to institute a crash program to develop its own technology to deal with potential threats from Earth. Pandora can download information into the Na’vi that would give them all the basics of a PhD level education in biology and possibly secure the cooperation of the traitorous – pardon me – enlightened humans who remained behind to obtain even more information in physics and practical engineering. Using the company outpost and plentiful unobtainium to jumpstart the effort, Pandora could have its first factories up and running in a couple of years and its first space craft before the next starship from Earth shows up. The Pandora-plus-Na’vi symbiosis would have tremendous capability for expanding knowledge and technology. Eventually, Pandora could become a serious threat, with its own fleet of starships, crewed by Na’vi. The subtext would be that Pandora itself is Eden and, once it has partaken of the Tree of Knowledge (from the brains of Augustine and Sully), loses its innocence.

  The story of Pandora’s postlapsarian technological improvement program could be paralleled by events progressing on Earth. Selfridge leaves RDA and becomes a politician, warning about the Pandoran threat. A number of governments on Earth consider an aggressive Pandora a plausible worst case scenario. The solution is to send a large expedition with orders to prevent, by any means necessary, Pandora from developing starfaring technology. A genetically engineered pathogen injected into the biosphere that kills 90% of the trees would lobotomize Pandora. End of problem and no thermonuke has to be detonated. The tension comes from whether or not battle will be joined. Allow Selfridge who has been put in charge of the expedition to have a change of heart and communicate with the Pandoran force, headed by Sully. A modus vivendi is arrived at and Pandora and Earth civilization become friends and allies.

  For episode 3, the joint Pandoran-Terran fleet has to battle the evil cephalopods from the Greater Megellanic Cloud. The evil cephalopods are defeated and the Pandoran-Terran Co-Prosperity Sphere is declared, to the accompaniment of a faux-Enya ballad by James Horner. The End.

  Another possibility Cameron could consider is that there may be other human colonies that are more advanced than Earth, both in terms of technology, and in the “spiritual” way that Cameron is advocating. He introduces these advanced humans in the sequel.

  In 2000, Bill Joy wrote Why the future doesn’t need us. He argues for rigid controls over the development of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robots. (For a rebuttal, see Joy to the World, by Virginia Postrel. She sums up Joy’s article as “…a screed against unpredictable change, a call for a static world, and an assault on commerce and the individual desires it serves. It is the same old attack on the open society, just wrapped in cool clothes.”) In the Avatar universe, if neo-Luddism had been successful in stunting some technologies on Earth, it would explain the lack of A.I. and other technologies that are so glaringly absent in the first movie.

  One technology they didn’t block was cheap space travel. That means “misfits” can leave Earth and found their own societies elsewhere. One such group of misfits is made up of Extropians who rejected neo-Luddism. They left Earth in the middle of the 21^st century and colonized Mars. Once there, they developed both hard A.I., genetic self-improvement, functional immortality, and a global network consisting of their minds linked together with each other and with a benign network intelligence, which we could call Ares. The “Martians” have effectively become a transhuman species and replicated Pandora in hardware. The Martians arrive in their own starship at the beginning of episode 2 and offer assistance to the Pandorans. They know that the next Earth expedition will consist of a fleet of starships bent on colonization of Pandora.

  The first time we see the Martians, they exit from their ship wearing a few body adornments and what appears to be iridescent body paint. If they hadn’t just debarked from a spaceship, we would think they were a group of hunter-gatherers. All are bald but otherwise look completely human. Unlike the last group, they don’t wear special breathing equipment. The Martians include adults and children of various ages as well as a number of what appear to be large dogs. No one speaks yet we quickly get the impression that they are communicating with each other in some fashion. The dogs seem to be a part of this communication and, as if on command, form a perimeter within which the Martians deploy four-legged animals that are all torso and no head. The headless animals take up station just inside the canine perimeter. When this operation is completed, the dogs, as one, wheel and rejoin the Martians.

  In short order, the skies darken with banshees while thousands of animals charge the Martians from all sides. The headless animals extrude from their backs various devices that send directed sound and microwave beams at the animals. As the beams play back and forth along the animal attack front, the animals recoil as if in intense discomfort and leave the scene just as rapidly as they came. None is killed and none is obvious injured. (Note that the directed sound weapon – the LRAD – is already old technology. Directed microwave beams are under development and close to deployment. Why didn’t RDA use such non-lethal technology against the Na’vi and the animals? Two reasons: it would make the RDA less evil and would have been devastating against the Na’vi and the animals. Pandora could never have defeated such weapons if enough were deployed.)

  In the aftermath of the attack, the Martians wait. Presently the emissaries of Pandora arrive: Sully and Neytiri. For the first time, one of the Martians speaks. The Martian explains that they have come to offer their help against the invasion from Earth but only if Pandora requests it. The Martian asks for a meeting. At this point there could be a period of trust-building before the meeting is agreed to. The Martians could interact with the Na’vi starting out in English but learning Na’vi as rapidly as it is spoken to them. Within a few minutes, all further dialogue is in the Na’vi language.

  The story could now deal with an extended period of cultural exchange between the Martians and Na’vi that would allow for a dramatic exposition of the differences and similarities between two cultures that can link minds with members of their species and with a network intelligence. The symbiotic species that evolved on Pandora meet the symbiotic species that self-evolved on Mars.

  Eventually the meeting with Pandora occurs and the Martians are taken to a communications node where they produce braided bio-ethernet cables that they link to their own heads and to the glowing branches. When the Martians link, a piece Ares they brought with them links as well - Pandora encounters one of its own kind for the first time. The natural Eden meets the artificial one.

  I’ll leave as an exercise for the writer-director how to fill in the details – to establish the conflicts and their resolutions and to arrive at the thrilling denouement accompanied by Jame’s Horner’s next Academy Award-winning song: a faux-Enya ballad.

Final thoughts

Cameron has given us a much more deeply layered story than most critics realize and, perhaps through some internal confusion, a more layered story that even he realizes. The interactions of the characters – human, Na’vi, and the global brain Pandora - are full of enough possibilities for an extended arc of stories.

It’s hard not to be captivated by the lush environment Cameron has created on Pandora but he really must resolve the human-Pandoran conflict in a satisfactory way. I’ve offered a couple of suggestions about how he might go about this, with the second being the more serious one.

This is first time I’ve ever been disappointed in a Cameron movie but I’m enough of a fan that I’m willing to give him a chance at redemption with the sequel.

LATE UPDATE:

Directly after I completed this review I visited an aggregator site that focuses on popular science articles from a variety of publications (for example, “National Geographic” and “Scientific American”). The site leans strongly environmentalist. Not only are there never any articles that directly question the extreme AGW position, there are frequent articles by “psychologists” that purport to analyze AGW “denialists” and explain why they suffer from cognitive dissonance. Suffice that perusing this site, I stumbled onto an article in the Christian Science Monitor titled Avatar: the real-life science behind the fantasy. It begins with this line:

The producer of “Avatar” is fond of saying that writer and director James Cameron does not write science fiction, he writes science fact.

Except for the areas I discussed above, which are either junk- or pseudo-science, I’d agree. The “Avatar” article provides a link to a book intended to be a confidential report on Pandora that has been obtained by whistleblowers/activists to use against the RDA company. The “report” is excerpted here.

When I was putting together this review I felt that I had picked up all or most of the clues Cameron placed in the movie about Pandora but I regretted there was no way I could validate my speculations. I figured at some point there would be a novelization, as there was with The Abyss (by Orson Scott Card), which would explain everything and, if I were sufficiently motivated, I could buy it in order determine how close I came. Stupid me! That was so last century. Apparently, Cameron did a lot of forward marketing, including the purloined “report” which has probably been around for a while. Now that I’m aware of it, I’m strangely disappointed – everything is explained.

In any case, the excerpts from the “report” validate nearly all of my observations about the technical details. I’ll take the key points in order.

• Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system - I assumed this was Alpha Centauri but didn’t stick my neck out. No credit.
• Physical parameters of Pandora - Mostly bulls eyes here. I was right about the high tectonic activity and the high CO₂ content. Lower gravity, higher atmospheric pressure, check.
• Unobtainium - mostly right. I said it was a room temperature superconductor. Actually it is a very high temperature (up to 1500 celcius) superconductor – I’ll give myself full credit since RTS is the term for a high temperature superconductor that was current when I was a young lad. Obviously, it has remarkable properties. ‘Nuff said.
• Suppressing unobtainium development - Apparently Cameron is going to deal with this, though he’s doing it poorly. In the “report” it says that RDA is attempting to “suppress any attempt to develop a Terran alternative to unobtainium”. If unobtainium is being used on Earth then it can be duplicated - more to the point, duplication cannot be prevented. I reiterate: any civilization with starships has sufficient energy and technology to do any materials fabrication imaginable. I did offer a way out – certain branches of science and technology are banned by neo-Luddites. Of course, Cameron is never going to go that route. I think my story of the Martians and Pandorans is a better movie.

With this new information I see the direction things are going to go: Terran dissidents on Earth and on Pandora, with the help of the Na’vi and Pandora, will fight to overthrow the evil corporations and retake the Earth. After reverses culminating in a cliff-hanger in episode 2, they will be successful in episode 3. Fade out, credit roll, accompanied by the Oscar-winning “Hymn to Gaia” by James Horner.

I’m back, after a long hiatus. There are a number of reasons for the gap in my postings – some political, some personal. On the political front, though I’ve considered commenting on the Obama Administration’s foreign policy at various times, I didn’t really have anything to add beyond what readers could find elsewhere.

On the personal front, I’ve had a significant change on the job/career front: I recently became a Civil Servant working for the Department of the Navy. In other words, I’ve become a bureaucrat; part of the problem; my own worst enemy – take your pick. By way of consolation, national defense generally and the navy in particular are explicitly called out in the Constitution as powers of Congress, unlike nearly every other Federal agency.

Now that Obama’s promised direct talks with Iran have begun and it has been revealed that Iran has been constructing a clandestine enrichment facility under a mountain, it’s time to post and say, “I told you so”.

Apparently, the U.S. was aware of the existence of the secret facility during the Bush Administration, yet it did not use this information to discredit the NIE and make the case that Iran’s nuke program was running at full throttle. Because of this, should Iran end up developing nuclear weapons, Bush & Co. will bear equal responsibility with the naïve and incompetent Obama Administration.

In the past 2 weeks, unofficial Obama foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski validated another of my claims when he stated that the U.S. should actively prevent any IDF airstrike from flying through Iraqi airspace:

Q: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?
A: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?
Q: What if they fly over anyway?
A: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

Brzezinski subsequently attempted to “clarify” his comments, claiming they were misunderstood – that he meant that a tragic accident could happen. It’s true that the Liberty was a U.S. intelligence ship that the Israeli Air Force mistakenly attacked during the 6 Day War. However, Brzezinski said that the U.S. should be “serious” and “go up and confront” the Israelis. If we are not to appear like “impotent little babies” implicitly we have to be prepared to shoot their aircraft down. There is no way deliberately attacking Israeli aircraft is comparable to the Liberty incident. It makes one wonder why Brzezinski drew the comparison. There are those who claim that the U.S. and Israeli governments colluded in a cover-up of a deliberate Israeli attack – a claim about as credible as those of the 9/11 Truthers. In the context of his full statement, referring to the Liberty leads one to conclude that Brzezinski let slip what he really thinks: that Israel deliberately attacked the U.S. ship 40-odd years ago and it would be payback if we were to do the same to Israel.

Here’s what I had to day in Worst Case Obama: Part 3, posted just before the November election:

Obama is the candidate of the extreme left, which comprises a substantial group who are extremely anti-Israel. The virulence of anti-Israel rhetoric from this group rises to a level I call “proto-anti-Semitic”. Here are some examples: Israel has committed “genocide” against the Palestinians; pro-Israeli Jews are guilty of divided loyalties; American foreign policy is controlled by a Jewish cabal made up of ex-Democrats (that is, “neocons); and so on. “Proto-anti-Semitism” means the speaker is not anti-Semitic but has a grossly exaggerated view of the power, influence, and tribalism of American Jews that reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes. Proto-anti-Semitism creates a favorable environment and cover for crypto-anti-Semitism, where the speaker is anti-Semitic but hides behind what is claimed is legitimate political discourse.

I went on to say that “…some of [Obama’s] closest foreign policy and military advisors have expressed views that put them in one or the other category (in fairness to Obama, some of these advisers were asked to resign). Even advisors who are more circumspect in their statements have a long history of being very pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli.” One of these advisors was and is Zbigniew Brzezinski. I then said:

…For Obama, there will be no acceptance of the Israeli view that Iran is an existential threat and therefore no justification for an Israeli preemptive strike. After all, the Mullahs are reasonable and Obama can negotiate with them. Obama’s peace offensive would be derailed by any Israeli strike – even one that avoids U.S.-controlled airspace – because Iran will treat the U.S. as complicit. Unlike the Bush administration, which would, at worst, only apply some sort of political and/or economic sanctions after the fact, the Obama administration can’t permit any attack to take place under any circumstance. The only way to accomplish this is to threaten to actively defend Iran against an Israeli attack – to threaten to shoot down Israeli jets whether they overfly Iraq or not.

So far, no spokesman for the Administration has said that any attack would be shot down and, given Obama’s sagging approval ratings, it is becoming harder for such a statement to be made publically. Still, with Brzezinski essentially saying that the U.S. should be prepared to shoot down Israeli jets, it’s a good indicator of how Obama and his other foreign policy advisors probably view things.

Meanwhile, according to Jane’s (subscription required), Iran now has 8,000 centrifuges operating in the Natanz facility. This is the upper limit of my 6,000 to 8,000 threshold. Along with the potential 3,000 that could be accommodated by the 2^nd facility, it means that there is almost no time left for action. Add to this, an unsubstantiated report appeared in the U.K. press that the Saudis were prepared to grant the IDF rights to use their airspace. Thus far, the Saudis have not denied this report.

I figure the Israelis are prepared to launch a full scale attack on 24 hours notice. It can’t be long now.

I just came across this article by geologist Jeffrey Park in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Park says that the seismic data indicate the latest North Korean test was another fizzle, concluding the yield was “likely 4 kilotons or smaller”.

According to the author bio in the sidebar, Park seems to be qualified to opine knowledgably on the seismic data. In my previous post, I cited a Guardian article. I failed to note that article relied exclusively on a Russian source for estimates of the device’s yield. Recall that after the 2006 test, the Russians’ estimates were way above everyone else’s, calling into question the accuracy of their seismic data and/or their analysis.

If Park is right it tends to support my view that the North Koreans produced a batch of plutonium contaminated with too much Pu-240. This, I think, is the best explanation of the documented low yield back in 2006 and the (possible) low yield last month. North Korean technology is just too primitive to solve the problem they doubtless created when they tried to increase the reactor’s plutonium output through a higher burnup. Higher burnup translates into a higher percentage of Pu-240.

For now, I’ll wait to pass judgment on the success of the North Korean test until there is some agreement on the seismic data, though I’m inclined to accept Park’s estimate of 2 to 4 kilotons.

Back in October 2006, I speculated (accurately) that North Korea’s nuke test was a “fizzle”. Yesterday, North Korea (aka the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea – DPRK) conducted another test, this time achieving a yield of aproximately 20 kilotons. As I said in the 2006 article:

North Korea has repeatedly shown itself to be technologically backward – for example, after eight years of trying, it remains unable to launch an ICBM. Arguably, 60-year-old nuclear technology is nearly as challenging as 50-year-old rocket technology. Consequently, it is extremely unlikely that North Korea would attempt anything more advanced than a 1^st generation plutonium bomb along the lines of the “Fat Man” that was first tested by the U.S. in July 1945. A 1^st generation device should have a nominal yield of around 20 kilotons – hence, the “dud” speculation.

It appears that North Korea has finally gotten it right.

There are no real details at this point. If we assume that the North Koreans are still relying on their existing plutonium stockpile, they’ve obviously figured out how to get around the Pu-240 problem. Even so, given the torturously slow pace of their technological advance (they still haven’t managed to successfully launch an ICBM), North Korea isn’t likely to become a threat to the U.S. for some years.

The U.S. perhaps can afford to be complacent. Japan, which is in North Korean missile range, cannot. The Japanese have “breakout” capability that would give them deliverable thermonukes in a year or so. All that is required is the exercise of political will to make it happen. Along with the SM-3 ship-launched ABM acquired from the U.S., which is carried by their home grown Aegis DDG’s, Japan has a credible missile defense. In light of the Korea’s experience with the Japan in the first half of the 20^th century, Kim Jong-Il should be loath to provoke the Japanese into arming themselves with thermonukes. Yet, that is precisely what is going to happen if the diminutive dictator continues on his present course.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a study 14 March 2009 laying out an Israeli attack scenario against Iranian nuclear sites. It is very similar to my Scenario 1 from 12 February 2007, which describes a direct strike on the key Iranian nuke sites.

There are some differences between the CSIS and my scenario. Before I get into those, I’ll note several instances where the CSIS study either confuses aircraft types or numbers of aircraft. I’m doing this in order to avoid passing the confusion on to possible readers.

Throughout the CSIS study, the F-15I “Thunder” is consistently referred to as F-15E. The F-15I is essentially an F-15E with Israeli modified electronics and avionics. In fact, the CSIS study correctly shows the Israelis with 25 F-15I’s and no F-15E’s on page 54. Accordingly, I’ll assume that when the CSIS study refers to F-15E’s it really means F-15I’s. The study also states that the Israelis have 4 “B-700” tankers (p. 71). According to the sources I consulted when I put together Scenario 1, Israel had 5 KC-130H and 5 KC-707 tankers. Later that year, Jane’s gave 3 KC 130H and 4 KC-707 tankers. Global Security now also gives 4 KC-707 tankers. I therefore assume that the one reference to the B-700 really means KC-707 and is either a typo or referring to a generic Boeing aircraft in the 700 series.

There is also a bit of confusion with respect to the tanker inventory. In the mission force allocation (p. 70), the target packages require a total of 12 “KC-130” tankers. Israel has no more than 5 KC-130H’s. If for some reason the analysis is using the KC-130H as a reference tanker, it would mean that several KC-130H’s would be replaced by one KC-707 in an actual mission. It would have been helpful if this had been called out in the CSIS study.

One key difference between the CSIS study and my scenario is that CSIS posits the F-15I’s have been modified to carry two 2100kg BLU-113 bunker busters (see p.45) instead of one. Carrying only one in my scenario meant that all 25 of the F-15I’s (24 F-15I’s + 1 spare/backup) plus 22 F-16’s carrying the smaller BLU-109’s were needed to take out the two Natanz enrichment buildings. (Note that in a later posting I stated I wasn’t sure if the BLU-109 could penetrate into the building proper without “double targeting”. Double targeting entails using the first bomb to blow a crater and the second to follow immediately behind and penetrate the rest of the way.) By carrying two BLU-113’s, the CSIS study concludes that 25 F-15’s alone would be sufficient to take out the Natanz facility and might include double targeting (p. 37).

The CSIS study also adds the UF₆ plant at Esfahan to the reference strike (p. 70). The CSIS study does mention the possibility of using “Buddy Refueling” to provide extra tanker capacity (p. 71), a topic I have previously discussed. (Note that the possible use of buddy refueling may also explain the 12 KC-130 tankers listed on page 70. Several F-16’s with buddy packs would equal one KC-130H.) The total number of aircraft used for 3 targets (Natanz, Arak, and Esfahan) in the CSIS study is 89 (80 combat plus 9 tankers). My strike gave 145 (133 combat plus 2 jammers and 10 tankers) for 2 targets (Natanz and Arak). Assuming only 25 F-15I’s are needed for Natanz, this would reduce the overall numbers in my direct attack scenario to 120. This is not a huge disagreement and reflects my conservative approach.

I agree with CSIS that the use of conventional ballistic missile and cruise missile assets by Israel should be contemplated, even though I didn’t include them in my Scenario 1.

The CSIS study provides considerable background on enrichment, centrifuge technology, and Separative Work Units – topics I have also addressed on this blog - and has come to similar conclusions about Iranian bomb making capabilities. For example, we both calculate that at full capacity, Natanz will produce at least 500 kg/yr of weapons grade, high enriched uranium (HEU) resulting in a couple of dozen or so weapons. The table on page 109 showing Separative Work requirements for different starting enrichments illustrates the non-linear relationship between Separative Work and enrichment level. Unfortunately, because there is no analysis of its significance, the import of this information is easy to miss. I discussed the strategic ramifications of the Iranian low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile in some depth in my last posting.

CSIS did not consider a no flyover scenario, although I did. Instead, CSIS assumed one of three more or less direct routes – their “central route” over Jordan and Iraq being my Scenario 1. CSIS analyzed both the political and operational costs of the three routes and concluded a northern route over Syria and southern Turkey was optimal. I considered and rejected this route figuring that operational considerations outweighed every other once violation of neutral airspace was settled upon. This is not to say that CSIS was wrong to select this route. If Israel has an understanding with the Turks, the northern route would become preferable.

A possible clue to Israeli attack plans is to examine what is currently being discussed in the Israeli media. Haaretz, no friend of either Likud or PM Benjamin Netanyahu, editorialized about an impending attack and the political groundwork being laid for it by Netanyahu. This, according to Haaretz, is the principle purpose of Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to the US:

Israel will find it difficult to attack Iran alone without a ‘green light’ from America, even if it is only implied and if America ostensibly turns a blind eye. But once the moment of truth arrives, it is doubtful Obama would give the order to take down the Israeli planes heading to Iran - or for that matter to declare an end of aid to Israel or to sever relations. Obviously, the U.S. will want to remain somewhat distanced from any operation that is launched, so as not to be vulnerable to the anticipated Iranian response. But its strong commitment to Israeli security will not allow America to forcibly prevent a military operation designed to prevent a second Holocaust. That is the message Netanyahu will try to implant in the minds of the members of Congress.

I consider it very significant that the possibility Obama might give a “take down” or shoot down order is being seriously discussed in Israel and in the Israeli newspaper that is arguably the friendliest to the new administration. (This is a subject I discussed back in 31 October 2008, just before the election.) Netanyahu is wise to marshal as much political support in Congress as possible to elevate the political cost to the Obama administration of any attempt to “forcibly prevent” an Israeli attack.

An Obama-ordered shoot down would only be politically viable if the Israeli attack overflew Iraqi territory. It is worth considering that Netanyahu is deliberately misleading both the Obama administration and Iran as to the axis of the attack. If the assumption being made by all parties is that the attack is the CSIS “central route” (my direct attack), whereas the real attack follows a different route, this will enhance surprise when the attack is actually launched.

Given the monetary and personnel resources available to CSIS relative to my own, I’m pleased our conclusions were so close. (If anyone from CSIS happens on my site, contact me. For a suitable salary increase I’d be happy to work for you folks.)

Since my last posting in January, the political situation in Israel has clarified: 2^nd place finisher Likud and party leader Benjamin Netanyahu are now in charge. There have been some other changes as well. True to Obama’s campaign statements indicating he intended to limit/reduce/eliminate US ballistic missile defense programs, his administration is planning to eliminate US involvement in the joint US-Israeli Arrow 3 program, freeze U.S. land-based ABM deployment, and halt development of the Airborne Laser system, effectively killing it. In and of themselves, these decisions don’t affect the probable Israeli attack timetable because the ABM systems at issue would likely be deployed sometime after Iran crossed the nuclear threshold. I mention the Obama administration’s policy on ballistic missile defense here only because I may want to address it in a future post. The whole issue becomes somewhat less urgent if Israel defangs Iran. When we might expect the defanging to occur is the topic I’m going to discuss in the balance of this article.

In some of my earliest posts, I stated that Iran conceivably could have its first nuke (a one megaton thermonuke) in late 2007. As we know, that did not happen chiefly because the schedule for the expansion of the Natanz facility has “slipped to the right”. Recall that in Is there a “threshold”?, written 16 May 2007, I gave 6,000 to 8,000 as the largest number of operating centrifuges that would be tolerated before preemption became a necessity. I further stated that I would choose the lower number if it were my decision. I concluded by saying, “If the U.S. doesn’t attack by that point, it’s not going to attack. That’s when Israel will step up to the plate if it hasn’t already done so.”

We now have good information from a variety of sources that Iran will have 6,000 centrifuges installed and running by this summer and, most importantly, that Iran had, at the end of last year, produced enough U-235 at a 3.8% enrichment level to make at least one bomb. This latter fact is significant for reasons the popular media and the Obama administration have neglected to discuss.

To understand, let’s make use of this handy-dandy Separative Work Calculator from Urenco, the large uranium enrichment company based in Europe.

Using a neutron reflector (like beryllium) along with implosion, a much smaller amount of U-235 is needed for a critical mass than with a gun design and no neutron reflector. This is less than 20 kg, at high enrichment levels. At least this amount is known to be present in the uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) “product” that Iran has stockpiled. Note that 3.8% U-235 cannot be fashioned into a bomb - at least 20% U-235 is needed. For practical reasons the enrichment level for “weapons grade” uranium is normally in the 90% range.

Iran has been enriching uranium for a couple of years to get to this point, adding centrifuge capacity as it has gone along. One might be inclined to believe that there is still a large margin of safety based upon the assumption that, since it took this long to get to 3.8%, it must require a significant amount of additional time/effort to get to 90%+. It doesn’t work that way – the relationship is logarithmic, not linear. To illustrate, let’s go to the calculator.

First a caveat: I’m not a weaponeer so I don’t know the exact amounts of U-235 that would be needed for a 1 megaton thermonuke (see here, which includes my argument why Iran will go directly to a one megaton device). I do know that, in addition to the U-235 for the trigger, there would also be U-235 needed to initiate the fusion reaction in the lithium-6 deuteride. I’m going to use 30 kg of 95% enriched U-235 as a good ballpark value for the total required.

The units in the calculator are metric tonnes (1,000 kg = 1 metric tonne), so we enter the values accordingly. For “Feed Assay” enter 0.711 (the percentage of U-235 in natural uranium); for “Product Assay” enter 95; for tails enter 0.3; for product enter 0.03 (30 kg = 0.03 metric tonnes). Hit the “Calculate” button. You get 6.14424 tSW. We could also express this as 6144.24 kg SW. The “Feed” is 6.91241 tonnes of natural uranium (the box immediately below is the amount of UF₆ gas). Now, clear out the entries. For “Feed Assay” enter 0.711 again; for “Product Assay” enter 3.8; for tails enter 0.3. This time, enter the 6.91241 we got above in the “Feed” box for tU. Hit the “Calculate” button. We get 3.97689 tSW. (Incidentally, if you want to check this with another calculator, you can plug the appropriate values into the FAS Separative Work Calculator – the results will be the same to 4 decimal places).

What does all of this mean? To get from natural uranium to 95% enriched, bomb grade uranium (known as high enriched uranium – HEU) takes 6.14424 tSW. To take the same amount of natural uranium to 3.8% enrichment (known as low enriched uranium – LEU) requires 3.97689 tSW. Most of the work (around 64%) expended is to get from 0.711% to 3.8%. With 6,000 or so centrifuges running at max efficiency, it should take only a few weeks to go from 3.8% to 95%.

As I write this, Iran’s “public” nuclear program is subject to IAEA monitoring. So long as the centrifuge operation and LEU UF₆ stockpile are compliant with IAEA safeguards, there is no “immediate” threat, or so the argument against preemption goes. Militating against this is the speed with which the first bomb can be produced – a few weeks if the Natanz facility is converted to bomb making. A few weeks would still offer time to issue an ultimatum and then attack. However, as Iranian enrichment capacity increases, along with the stock of LEU, the Israeli reaction time decreases. This is the basic calculus behind my original threshold argument. Israel cannot put itself into a position where it has little time and no margin for error when it attacks. Added to this problem is that if Iran has a small clandestine facility somewhere, it could begin to divert the LEU and initiate bomb production. It would be suicidal folly for the Israeli government to depend on the competence of the IAEA to catch Iranian diversion. No doubt Israel relies heavily on human intelligence (humint) on the Iranian program gathered by the Mossad – the best intel agency in the world. Still, the difficulty of monitoring what the Iranians are doing, even throwing in spy satellite sweeps, increases exponentially as the Iranian program expands.

It is the inexorable mathematics of Separative Work and the enrichment process that is driving Israeli planning now. Doubtless, the Israeli attack plan is fully developed and could be set in motion in 24 hours or less. The Israelis must immediately respond to any LEU diversion they detect, irrespective of what the IAEA or international community may say. As stated above, because of the reduced amount of Separative Work required to produce a bomb from the LEU, small, widely dispersed cascades that have thus far gone undetected could readily complete the process.

The lower limit of the threshold will be reached in at most a couple of months. Based upon this, my prediction is that Israel will attack some time this summer at the latest. Israel could potentially delay a short period beyond that, with an emphasis on the word “short”. The larger the stockpile grows, even if the number of centrifuges added at Natanz is halted, the bigger the problem for Israel.

The optimal time to attack in order to maximize the Israeli advantages is 48 hours either side of New Moon at 0200 local. The months of June through September are most likely with the odds of an Israeli preempt increasing through the summer.

Though I expect a night attack, I wouldn’t rule out a daylight strike. In fact, if I were the head of the IDF, I’d strongly advise it. One of the most important resources available to the Iranians is the experience their engineers and technicians have gained over the years the nuclear program has been in operation. It is, therefore, an unfortunate necessity to kill as many of these people as possible. A daylight attack will find the maximum number of engineers and technicians at work. In addition to the enrichment facility at Natanz and the heavy water plant at Arak (see Scenario 1), cruise missiles, possibly augmented by SpecOps, should hit research centers where scientists would be located. Like the Allied raid against the Peenemunde V-2 facility in 1943 which sought to kill von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, the Iranian nuclear scientists are prime targets.

The Israelis have shown remarkable restraint throughout their history, so I doubt they will choose my approach. But, be assured, attack they will.

On 10 January, the New York Times posted U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site, which claims that the U.S. refused to supply Israel with advanced bunker busters, refueling aircraft, or to allow overflights of Iraq for an attack on Iran. Nothing in this article should surprise readers of this blog. In Playing Chicken: how Iran might win a nuclear war back in September 2005, I said that U.S. sale of bunker busters and specialized, long-range aircraft (the F-16I and F-15I) to Israel were part of a U.S. bluff:

[T]he Iranians could reasonably expect that the U.S. would keep Israel in check – in other words, if the U.S. doesn’t act, Israel probably won’t either. The U.S. is obviously playing its version of the game: the sale of equipment to Israel that would be needed for preemption (for example, bunker busters) is rather like throwing the steering wheel out of the car window. “We have no control over the Israelis, and they’ve demonstrated in the past they will preempt,” is the message we’re trying to send. The Iranians – rightly in my opinion – believe this is a bluff.

No U.S. administration was or is going to actively cooperate with Israel in attacking Iran. That’s one of the main reasons I figured that the U.S. had to carry out the attack.

In my first Israeli attack scenario, I analyzed an Israeli attack taking the direct route over Iraq. This scenario was predicated on the U.S. not taking active steps to prevent an overflight – that is, shoot down Israeli aircraft. I said that the Israelis would only inform the U.S. once the attack was underway. Nearly all of the risk in this operation is tied to uncertainties about possible U.S reactions, principally political but some military risks as well. The second scenario posited an attack that stays in international airspace until crossing the Iraqi border. The distance involved is so great and tanker aircraft so limited that only the Natanz site could be hit by a small force. Even if this attack were effective, it would leave the Arak heavy water and plutonium production facilities untouched. The fact that the political cost for Israel is nearly as great as scenario 1, coupled with the limited objectives and tight margins of scenario 2, make it unlikely to be chosen, in my view.

I maintain that if Netanyahu and Likud win, the odds are good that Israel will attack, probably by the direct route though a slightly longer route over Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can’t be ruled out. Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is – a buddy offered to bet me that Israel would not attack. I wasn’t confident enough to take the bet. For one thing, although Likud probably will win it isn’t a certainty and, were Likud to lose, I’m not particularly confident that the Kadima government will buck the U.S. and attack. (I’ll still stick with the prediction I made on this blog.) I was, however, willing to offer another bet: if the principal Iranian nuclear facilities are not attacked, there will be a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran before the end of 2012.

I’ve been consistent in my analysis that Iran is either not deterrable or will be too aggressive, making it likely Iran will blunder into a nuke war. There is a third possibility I’ve long considered though haven’t heretofore discussed: a nuclear Iran may undergo a political upheaval or revolution and launch its nukes in a final, convulsive Götterdämmerung. Back in March 2005 in Preemptive war against Iran, I said:

From the perspective of the mullahs, Western culture is a mortal threat. Against the freedom, affluence, and vitality of the West, the mullahs can only offer a decadent medievalism that was on the way out 500 years ago. The mullahs realize that without nukes, Iran will be unable to maintain its closed society and the theocracy will collapse of its own weight.

If Iran can be deprived of nukes and otherwise contained, the theocracy will collapse. But what happens if Iran gets its nukes and then the inevitable collapse occurs? The Mullahs are never going to step down peacefully – the theocracy’s janissaries, the fanatical Revolutionary Guard, will fight to the last man. The Revolutionary Guard will also control the Iranian nuclear arsenal when it comes into existence because only the Guard will be deemed politically reliable. It is naïve to believe that, as their last act, the keepers of the nuclear fire will not unleash it on the infidels.

Will Israel’s new Arrow 3, the U.S. Navy’s SM-3, and the Air Force’s Airborne Laser anti-ballistic missile systems be able to shoot down an Iranian strike? The potential effectiveness of the various ABM systems must figure in the Iranian strategic calculus when planning its attack. Talking all of the political, theological, economic, and technological factors into account, I give the odds of a nuclear exchange before 1 January 2013 as 50-50.

Israel is now several days in to a major operation intended to attrition Hamas and degrade its ability to launch indiscriminate rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. In November, just before Obama won, I predicted that the Kadima-led Israeli government would launch an attack on Iran in the month before the February 10 parliamentary elections. I argued that this ”January Surprise” would, among other things, help Kadima and party leader Tzipi Livni against the favored Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu. Given the timing of the attack on Hamas, has it taken the place of a January attack on Iran? My answer: probably.

Since I made my prediction, Obama has selected a foreign policy team which is much better than any I (or probably anyone else) could have anticipated. By retaining Robert Gates as Defense Secretary and putting Hillary Clinton at the head of the State Department, we can dismiss my postulated worst case foreign policy scenario from further consideration. With few exceptions, pragmatists will be running U.S. foreign policy in the Obama administration, which ironically means that Obama’s first term really will be something like a Bush third.

From the Israeli perspective, U.S. foreign policy isn’t going to change that much, though that is not necessarily an appealing prospect. As I wrote back in January, 2007, “With Gates in the administration, everyone surrounding Bush now appears to be counseling that the only option in dealing with Iran is diplomatic because the military option isn’t feasible…”. The Obama administration is not going to be hostile to Israel but it is also not likely to do anything to denuclearize Iran. In fact, there are indications that the Obama administration will adopt a policy first articulated by Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary campaign.

According to a report in Haaretz, the U.S. will propose to extend its nuclear umbrella over Israel and massively retaliate in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack. Such a policy would only be contemplated if the standard deterrent theory view has prevailed: that Iran is deterrable. The Haaretz article agrees:

But America’s nuclear guarantee to Israel could also be interpreted as a sign the U.S. believes Iran will eventually acquire nuclear arms. Secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton had raised the idea of a nuclear guarantee to Israel during her campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency. During a debate with Obama in April, Clinton said that Israel and Arab countries must be given “deterrent backing.” She added, “Iran must know that an attack on Israel will draw a massive response.

Actually, Hillary’s exact words were that the U.S. would to “obliterate Iran”. That statement, though bracing at the time, was and remains strategically wrongheaded. As I’ve previously discussed, a nuclear Iran will either attack Israel out of religious zealotry or, more likely, provoke a nuclear exchange through hyperaggressiveness. Even if a war with Israel is somehow avoided, Iran will merely shift its attention to its ultimate adversary: the U.S. It will develop ICBM’s and play chicken some time in Obama’s second term.

Whether or not the U.S. deterrent strategy is valid (see, for example, my counterargument to preempting against Iran), it is unlikely that it will ever be acceptable to Israel. To quote a famous U.S. politician: “[I]f you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens.” The famous U.S. politician was Barack Obama. He offered this insight during the primary campaign.

Israel developed an independent nuclear deterrent precisely because history has shown that Jews can ultimately only depend on themselves for defense. Obama’s statement suggested that he understood this. Why then would his administration float the idea that the Israelis should become totally dependent on the U.S. deterrent? I prefer not to speculate.

What is obvious is the U.S. is not going to attack. Therefore, Israel must. The absolute last chance for Israel to denuclearize Iran is this year. The only question remaining is when. The answer is, sometime after the general election and the formation of a new government. The “January Surprise” attack on Iran is not going to happen. The reason for this is purely political, not military.

The Israeli Air Force has ample resources to carry out the reference strike on Iran even as it conducts operations in Gaza. The aircraft that would be used in the Iran strike are special purpose and are almost certainly not being used in the Gaza operation. In fact, the Gaza operation could provide a degree of operational cover: no one is going to expect Israel to launch an air strike on Iran in the midst of a major operation by the IDF in Gaza.

The only resource that Israel has in short supply is political credit. The U.S. is the lone support for Israel’s Gaza campaign. If U.S.-Israeli relations are going to be strained by an Israeli attack on Iran, it is best that this happen after the Gaza campaign is over and U.S. support is less critical. Right or wrong, I expect this is the thinking of the current government.

So, Gaza is the January Surprise. Politically, it’s at best a damp squib.

My final prediction: Likud will emerge from the 10 February elections as the leading vote getter and Benjamin Netanyahu will form a government. Shortly thereafter, Israel will attack Iran.

Having covered the low probability worst case scenarios for an Obama administration, I now want to make some general observations about the most likely course for President-Elect Obama and Congressional Democrats. Previously, I said:

Obama’s true genius is in self-promotion and the acquisition of power. He is exactly the sort of person the Framers had in mind when they put so many checks and balances into the Constitution. Today, most of those checks – those negative feedbacks – have been eliminated. Obama will have more scope for a malign ambition that any President in U.S. history.

I stand by that statement. However, the fact that a President wields more power than ever before doesn’t mean Obama has been given a carte blanche.

Some of the checks and balances still exist: Congress retains a huge amount of power but it is rooted in regional, state, and demographic constituencies. Those constituencies didn’t suddenly change in 2006, when the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. Many of the Republicans unseated in 2006 and this year were replaced with centrists or with conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats. In the House especially, party discipline carries only so far with such individuals – they ultimately have to answer to the voters in their respective Districts. Can the Blue Dogs be stampeded into supporting a radical agenda? Sure, as I’ve suggested in my worst case scenarios. If the economic situation worsens it can be exploited by the left-wing Democratic leadership. Crisis always creates a bias in favor of expanded government power. Absent a complete collapse, however, the Democratic centrists are going to be hesitant to sign on to sweeping changes their constituents aren’t going to like. As a number of analyses show (see, for example, A sweeping rejection of President Bush by David Boaz of the Cato Institute), the electoral center that Obama won voted for more fiscal responsibility and less foreign interventionism – not a “New ‘New Deal’”. Expect Obama’s ambitions, whether malign or not, to be significantly thwarted by members of his own party.

Aside from the lack of ideological purity within the ruling Democratic Party there is a second potential impediment to radical change: the permanent federal bureaucracy.

Back in the good old days, the federal bureaucracy was tiny and largely comprised of members of the victorious party. When the party took power, it rewarded party stalwarts with positions in the government. This system was called the patronage or “spoils” system. All this eventually changed after the assassination of James A Garfield when his successor, Chester A. Arthur, and Congress established the merit-based, non-partisan Civil Service. My view is this was a disaster for the Republic (here is a good, libertarian-oriented historical overview of how the civil service came to be) because the bureaucracy, though nominally part of the Executive Branch, promulgates regulations having the force of law, thus operating as its own Legislative Branch. Over time the various components of the federal bureaucracy have become primarily devoted to self-preservation and “rent seeking”. Today, the U.S. Government really is the unelected bureaucracy.

Ironically, although the permanent bureaucracy is a threat to freedom and antithetical to the whole idea of limited government, it can act as a check on the unbridled exercise of power by a President. A new President is going to be viewed as a caretaker – he or she is going to be around at most 8 years. High level bureaucrats are people who have been members of the organization for most if not all of their professional lives, which will have encompassed several administrations. They have no allegiance to the new President even if they generally share the President’s ideology. First and foremost, their allegiance is to the bureaucracy itself.

President Obama can and will appoint radicals to head key agencies. For example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s name as been bruited about as a possible EPA head. RFK Jr. is to Environmentalism as Torquemada was to Catholicism. Even with someone like RKF Jr. in charge, the EPA will remain composed of various factions that consume a considerable amount of energy in political infighting. Attending this will be all manner of systemic inefficiencies that have developed over a period of decades. The result is a level of organizational inertia that will resist any attempt to rapidly change direction or focus. Assuming he is a skilled administrator and remains as EPA head long enough, RFK Jr. could eventually get the agency to become more radical but even he is still unlikely to turn it into the office of the Grand Environmental Inquisitor, much as he might like to.

Obama will depend on the bureaucracies in the Executive Branch to implement as best they can the policies he and Congress cook up. Federal agencies are probably the least efficient of any bureaucracy so their best is going to be pretty bad. Implementation will be haphazard and schedules will “move to the right”.

A final consideration is that the Obama administration will eventually offend one or more high level bureaucratic factions at some point. In Deep Throat revealed – and what it reveals, I said of “Deep Throat” (W. Mark Felt), “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.” At a minimum, bureaucrats who develop enmity toward the Obama administration will leak information intended to damage it and the President. Perhaps the Obama people will be able to minimize the political and PR sequelae. The press will also tend to protect him. However, old patterns will eventually assert themselves – the press simply can’t pass up a good story, whether true or not - and Obama will find his policies and competence questioned. Keeping his approval numbers high will tend constrain his worst impulses and he will be forced to be more centrist than he ever intended.

There is ample evidence that the Israeli government and Israelis in general believe that an Obama administration will be much more inclined toward Israel’s enemies than any previous U.S. administration. There is also ample evidence that the Israeli government and the Bush administration have major disagreements over the imminence of the Iranian threat. If a Bush administration would react unfavorably to an Israeli preempt, how is a distinctly unfriendly (to Israel) Obama administration going to react? As I discussed in my previous article it is not unthinkable that the Obama administration would threaten to actively prevent an Israeli attack on Iran that would interfere with direct U.S.-Iran peace talks.

The Israeli planners will likely assign a low probability to an actively hostile U.S. administration – it is a “worst case” after all. Even without a worst case scenario, the Israelis are very close to the “drop dead date” for preemption. Rather than deal with the uncertainties of an Obama administration, the prudent course is to attack before the Obama administration can establish new policies and communicate them to the Israelis. The Israelis can therefore be expected to follow the old adage that it is better to ask forgiveness than seek permission.

There is another very important factor that would exist even if John McCain were elected: the Israeli parliamentary elections are going to be held in early February. The Kadima Party, now headed by Tzipi Livni, faces repudiation by the voters – the Likud Party, headed by former PM Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to pick up a large number of seats in the Knesset. Moreover, Kadima is a fusion party. Though most of its members were formerly with Likud, many prominent former members of Labor also joined the Party. Kadima is very much a creature of Ariel Sharon, who created the Party after he left Likud, and now that he is out of the picture there is a legitimate question as to whether or not Kadima can remain intact. Benjamin Netanyahu has made it very clear that if he and Likud head the government, there will be no “Second Holocaust” from an Iranian nuclear attack. Livni and Kadima are perceived as more dovish, relatively speaking. This would be a problem apart from the corruption of former Kadima head Ehud Omert, which forced his resignation and is the proximate cause of the early elections.

For all of the foregoing reasons, Israel will attack before the February elections. The only question that remains is when. There are two options: during the lame-duck term of George W. Bush or at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term.

Bush is very well liked in Israel and is widely viewed as a friend. There is still a remote possibility that Bush will launch air strikes so the Israelis will probably give him at least through November. Assuming, as I do, that there is still some flex in the Israeli attack schedule, I am guessing that the Israelis won’t attack while Bush is still President. That moves D-Day to early in the Obama Presidency. For domestic political purposes, a few weeks before the February elections – sometime in late January – would be optimal once it has been decided to attack. Think of it as being the Israeli political equivalent of the American “October Surprise”.

The temptation for a Kadima-led government to attack in January would exist if McCain were elected but I don’t believe it would be acted upon. McCain is known and respected – Israelis trust that he will take action against Iran or, at least, will not prevent the Israelis from doing so.

So, I am formally predicting that Israel will launch a preemptive attack on Iran that takes the most expeditious route – that is, the attack will go through Iraqi airspace. It will take place in the latter part of January, while the Obama administration is organizing itself. Were I planning the Israeli strike, in order to eliminate any worst case scenario in which the Obama administration interferes with it, I’d launch the attack so that the first wave crosses over into Iraqi airspace at 17:01 GMT on 20 January. This would be at the same time Obama is taking his Oath of Office. No one in the U.S. government will be in a position to react to this “crisis” and the Israelis can expect no interference from U.S. force.

Obama is going to be very displeased that his peace plans for the Mideast are dashed – he’ll be personally affronted if the Israelis attack during his Inauguration, thus sending the message that they don’t trust him. It doesn’t really matter because Obama is going to be drug, kicking and screaming, into fighting a war with Iran in the Persian Gulf. The ironic aspect is that the vast military apparatus he will head will be able to kick major butt – Obama may well come out of a U.S.-Iran military engagement with enhanced stature because he will have been forced into doing the right thing.

It is four days before the general election and an Obama victory appears all but certain. One issue that has arisen over the past few days derives from comments by running mate Joe Biden that were taped at a private event. Biden said that Obama would be “tested” by some sort of foreign crisis within the first 6 months of his administration and suggested that his way of dealing with it might not be understood or popular initially. He called on followers to stick with Obama when that happened. Because Biden is wont to deliver all manner of non sequiturs when speaking, perhaps his statement isn’t worth serious consideration. However, since Biden was so pointed as to the time frame and even the public reaction, inquiring as to what he might have in mind is appropriate. The McCain-Palin campaign certainly thinks so, judging from an ad that has appeared using audio clips of Biden’s statements.

Commentators who have speculated on what the crisis might be have included the Mideast and Iran as possibilities but none has considered this as anything other than some sort of challenge from Iran. I think there is an obvious possibility that everyone is missing. Before I get to that, let me offer some background.

I’ve written extensively about the Iranian nuclear program and possible actions the U.S. or Israel might take to deal with it. Readers are encouraged to search this blog, which delves into possibilities few have discussed or that weren’t being discussed at the time I posted the article. One early article in the latter category argued that the U.S. would strongly resist any attempt by the Israelis to launch their own preemptive attack.

In Throwing out the steering wheel I said:

There is no way that an Israeli attack can take place without the U.S. condoning it. Israeli aircraft would have to pass through airspace controlled by the U.S. Thus, the universal view in the Islamic world will be that the Israelis are acting as henchmen for the U.S. – doing America’s dirty work. Since this would be a political disaster of epic proportions, I have always assumed that the U.S. would never permit it to take place – that, in fact, the U.S. will attack.

[Emphasis added.] (Note also that I later analyzed Israeli attack scenarios – see Scenario 1 and Scenario 2. In the latter I concluded that an Israeli attack that didn’t overfly airspace under U.S. control was feasible.)

The quoted article was neither the first nor the only one where I asserted that the U.S. would not allow Israel to preempt against Iran. Yet, in none of those articles did I ever explicitly state what the U.S. would do to prevent the Israelis from attacking or what the U.S. would do if Israel attacked despite our disapproval. I’ll do that now.

I have always assumed that when U.S. and Israeli officials discuss an Israeli preemption, the U.S. representative states in the strongest possible language that such at attack would gravely affect U.S.-Israeli relations. The “grave” effects would include various forms of political and economic sanctions, such as cutting off sales of weapons and spare parts or cancellation of joint U.S.-Israeli weapons programs among others. So, “prevention” is achieved by the threat of sanctions and a cooling of relations. I expect the frequency of such discussions has increased over the past year or so as Iran approaches the “threshold” of nuclear capability (see, for example, Is there a “threshold”?). There is little doubt the Israelis have made clear to the U.S. they view Iran as an “existential threat” and that, irrespective of the consequences for future U.S.-Israeli relations, they will attack at some point if the U.S. doesn’t. The U.S. understands and appreciates this, and there the matter rests.

We’ve reached the point where, despite his statements that he wouldn’t leave Iran as a problem for the next President, it is very unlikely that Bush will act. Although we can’t completely rule out an aerial campaign starting in late November, Bush has probably decided that Iran is far enough from weapons capability that the next President can handle the problem. Bush is expecting history to vindicate him on Iraq and he’s not going to risk his legacy by giving his successor a new war to worry about on Inauguration Day.

In the extremely unlikely event that McCain is the guy taking the Oath of Office on 20 January, we can be confident that he will launch air strikes against the Iranian nuclear infrastructure at some point if diplomatic means fail. Obama’s statements that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable or that use of force can’t be ruled out are not, however, credible.

Obama is the candidate of the extreme left, which comprises a substantial group who are extremely anti-Israel. The virulence of anti-Israel rhetoric from this group rises to a level I call “proto-anti-Semitic”. Here are some examples: Israel has committed “genocide” against the Palestinians; pro-Israeli Jews are guilty of divided loyalties; American foreign policy is controlled by a Jewish cabal made up of ex-Democrats (that is, “neocons); and so on. “Proto-anti-Semitism” means the speaker is not anti-Semitic but has a grossly exaggerated view of the power, influence, and tribalism of American Jews that reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes. Proto-anti-Semitism creates a favorable environment and cover for crypto-anti-Semitism, where the speaker is anti-Semitic but hides behind what is claimed is legitimate political discourse.

Though Obama has recently articulated the mainstream American view of Israel as a firm and trusted ally, there is pretty good evidence that Obama said what he really thinks about Israel when he was at a private gathering for Rashid Khalidi in 2003. The L.A. Times obtained a video of this event and used some quotes from speakers on the video for an article written several months back. An inside source says that the video includes comments from Obama, one of which is the statement that Israel is guilty of “genocide” against the Palestinians. This, it is claimed, is the reason that the L.A. Times doesn’t quote Obama and refuses to release a transcript.

That Obama might have said this in an unguarded moment is quite believable. He has had long associations – friendships, in fact – with proto- or crypto-anti-Semites. Moreover, some of his closest foreign policy and military advisors have expressed views that put them in one or the other category (in fairness to Obama, some of these advisers were asked to resign). Even advisors who are more circumspect in their statements have a long history of being very pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli.

Ultimately, whether or not Obama actually said that Israel is guilty of genocide (or secretly believes it), given the foreign policy team he has assembled, Obama can be expected to head the most anti-Israel administration in U.S. history. Obama expects to be successful in negotiations with Iran precisely because he will “understand” their position and acknowledge many of their grievances against Israel. For Obama, there will be no acceptance of the Israeli view that Iran is an existential threat and therefore no justification for an Israeli preemptive strike. After all, the Mullahs are reasonable and Obama can negotiate with them. Obama’s peace offensive would be derailed by any Israeli strike – even one that avoids U.S.-controlled airspace – because Iran will treat the U.S. as complicit. Unlike the Bush administration, which would, at worst, only apply some sort of political and/or economic sanctions after the fact, the Obama administration can’t permit any attack to take place under any circumstance. The only way to accomplish this is to threaten to actively defend Iran against an Israeli attack – to threaten to shoot down Israeli jets whether they overfly Iraq or not.

Such an unprecedented act by a U.S. administration would be very unpopular and the Obama administration would not make the threat against Israel public. That won’t make any difference – Israeli officials are guaranteed to leak it.

The six month time frame fits in very well with this scenario. Obama and his crew will be sticking with the flawed NIE assessment on Iran. Israel won’t. Israel has indicated publically that it is close to attacking and privately may have given something close to a drop dead date - late Spring or early Summer 2009 would be a good bet. It can be assumed that either candidate intelligence briefings or briefings Biden may have received by virtue of his chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have provided this information. Israel will have a nuclear capability threshold in mind, even if the U.S. doesn’t.

Once the U.S. threat is leaked, what then? Obama will have a political crisis on his hands. How will it play out? Obama cannot afford to back down. He’ll have to publically acknowledge that he has given shoot down orders in the event of an Israeli attack and he’ll have to stick by it. Would Israel test him? I’d guess the answer is no.

How would Congressional Democrats react to Obama’s approach? Would they require a reciprocal U.S. guarantee to Israel in the event Iran were to launch a nuclear attack? It’s hard to say. However, if Obama does prevent an Israeli attack and does enter into negotiations, Iran will get its nukes. Expect a rapid “breakout” and Iran fitting a half-dozen or so nukes on ballistic missiles. At that point we move into the sorts of nuclear scenarios I’ve discussed previously on this blog.

Given that Iran should probably have a dozen or more thermonuke-tipped ICBM’s sometime during a 2^nd Obama term (should he be reelected) and that Obama and the Democrats have stated they want to eliminate ballistic missile defense, we might even get to witness the Iranian “chicken” scenario”.

In my previous posting, I discussed why Obama and the Democrats might want to bring back the military draft. There was a public reason that would be offered but, behind it, there would be the intent to make the self-selected military organization more politically reliable. A few days later, and to my great surprise, I came across this piece on “the corner”, National Review Online’s blog. The article quotes Obama on the military draft:

And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.”

Obama correctly states that the people fighting are disproportionately from the small towns in flyover country - the red states. They aren’t from the urban areas. When Charles Rangel was advocating bringing back the draft a few years ago, he argued that people of color were disproportionately the ones fighting and dying. This was totally wrong. (Either Rangel was speaking out of ignorance or he was lying. As someone who has followed Rangel’s career over the years, I’d incline toward the latter view.) Note that Obama, unlike Rangel, gets it right. As with Obama’s statement to “Joe the Plumber”, I think Obama let his mask slip – he really is contemplating the need to create a politically reliable military.

In the previous post I said the following:

Do I think my worst case scenario will come to pass? Probably not – that’s why it is a “worst case” - but it is more likely than most people realize. The thing to keep in mind is that the unstated reasons for the policies I’ve mentioned need not be in the minds of most or even any of the people who enact them, including Obama, who is neither particularly smart nor any sort of strategic thinker.

I am retracting that last statement or, at least, modifying it. Obama is an ideologue – a Marxist radical – and I maintain that he is grotesquely ignorant of economics and foreign policy. However, he may well be a consummate political strategist. Consider that no one in modern U.S. history has been as signally unqualified to hold high office as Obama, yet he has risen faster than nearly every other Presidential aspirant (Teddy Roosevelt’s rise may be comparable). At the very least, Obama’s ascendancy bespeaks a high degree of political cunning.

Obama’s true genius is in self-promotion and the acquisition of power. He is exactly the sort of person the Framers had in mind when they put so many checks and balances into the Constitution. Today, most of those checks – those negative feedbacks – have been eliminated. Obama will have more scope for a malign ambition that any President in U.S. history.

Be afraid.

I never thought I’d find myself writing that I expect Barack Obama to be elected President but, unless his slip about “spreading the wealth” causes voters to realize that he is a thoroughgoing Marxist masquerading as a center-leftist, that is what is going to happen. Already, some commentators are beginning to contemplate what an Obama Presidency aligned with a Democratic Congress could mean. The Wall Street Journal opines in A Liberal Supermajority that profound changes of the New Deal or Great Society variety could be in the offing. Indeed. The article frets about a “filibuster-proof” Senate but it fails to understand that the filibuster is no longer a reliable check on the majority Party.

Back in 2005, I criticized the GOP for “strategic ineptitude” when it proposed the “nuclear” or “constitutional” option to eliminate judicial filibusters. Quoting from my conclusion:

The Democrats wanted to eliminate the filibuster in 1995 before it became a useful tool for them. Now that the GOP has shown how easy it would be to change the Senate rules, the filibuster has become a dead man walking that can be executed anytime a simple majority of Senators has the political will to do it. By not following through the GOP has invited the Democrats to eliminate the filibuster when it will favor them.”

In fact, if the Democrats have 50 Senators (plus Joe Biden for a tie-break) to change the rules and eliminate the filibuster rule then they can do so. Moreover, they need not limit it to judicial appointments.

Eliminating the filibuster brings on all of the dire consequences listed in the WSJ article but the article only scratches the surface of what is possible. It is probably the case that most of the proposals would pass constitutional muster given stare decisis and three generations of leftward drift in constitutional jurisprudence. However, I think it is possible that the so-called Fairness Doctrine might no longer find favor with the 4 conservative justices plus semi-conservative Anthony Kennedy. No worries. Obama & Co. merely resurrect FDR’s Court packing idea.

The Constitution doesn’t specify a number of Supreme Court Justices. Article III, in fact, only requires that a Supreme Court be created. (The composition, organization, and even the existence of lower Courts are completely at the discretion of Congress.) Accordingly, President Obama and the Democrats could decide to add 4 Justices. These 4 would be in their mid-to-late 30’s and the most radical, living-document ideologues available in left-wing academia. Unconstrained by the ridiculous doctrine of stare decisis (I happen to agree about stare decisis), they can overturn Heller and any other troublesome impediment to our Glorious Leader’s vision.

Obviously, if there is sufficient public outcry, these things won’t happen. However, if Obama and the Democrats are given what appears to be a mandate for change, expect that it will be exploited. The Democratic leadership of Congress is very left-wing so everything will hinge on the ideological composition of the House and Senate Democrats – especially the latter – as well as the power of the Democratic leadership. Exploiting economic fears of the general public can make it much easier to achieve pliancy from the blue dogs so don’t underestimate what is possible.

We already know that Obama’s vision includes things like compulsory service. Any argument for compulsory non-military service would apply to military service for reasons of fairness and equity, if nothing else. The system would probably allow citizens to choose between military or peaceful domestic service. Charles Rangel and other Democrats have been pushing for a military draft for years so it already has support. The unstated reason for bringing back the draft is that the volunteer Army is ideologically conservative and combat units are disproportionately white and from “red states”. An organization that overwhelmingly votes Republican and probably takes its oath to defend the Constitution seriously might take action against a Marxist putsch and, therefore, has to be neutered.

Assuring a permanent Democratic-socialist majority would also entail rigid control of the internet. Hillary and others have tried to do this before on the pretext of protecting minors from violence and porn. The new Supreme Court will let nearly any regulation of internet speech stand and that will make an enhanced version of campaign finance regulation that applies to the internet easy to enact.

Of course, at any point, a couple of million dedicated citizens could go to D.C., filling the streets and shutting down the federal government by peaceful means. My view is that the citizenry is far too decadent to do anything so the radical changes I’ve posited will not be effectively resisted when peaceful means would suffice. No, the people most likely to fill the streets are the “worst [who] are full of passionate intensity” – the Marxist and eco-fascist zealots.

Madison said, “Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.” The press is largely enslaved (if that’s the term for willing tools) already and Barack & Co. can complete the process as indicated above. The standing army exists but, like the press, can be made politically reliable or, at least, no threat to the government. That leaves the armed populace. If I am right that a worst case scenario doesn’t initially generate massive peaceful demonstrations, what is the likelihood that people will actually risk their lives when the disarming process starts?

Do I think my worst case scenario will come to pass? Probably not – that’s why it is a “worst case” - but it is more likely than most people realize. The thing to keep in mind is that the unstated reasons for the policies I’ve mentioned need not be in the minds of most or even any of the people who enact them, including Obama, who is neither particularly smart nor any sort of strategic thinker. As with any other system, a feature in a political system that serves one purpose can have other purposes as well.

Anyone who has been paying attention should be aware that Barack Obama is a radical Marxist with a hypertrophied ego. He could easily become the thing the Founders most feared: a cult-of-personality leader and a Caesar - a U.S. version of Hugo Chavez. The only question that remains is will he be given the power?

The latest on Sarah Palin is that she may have considered censoring books at the town library when she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska back in 1996. At present, to quote the Boston Herald), “[t]he stories are all suggestive, but facts are hard to come by.”

Did Palin actually ban books at the Wasilla Public Library? No one has adduced any evidence that she did. The Boston Herald notes that when questioned at the time by the town newspaper, Palin said her “inquiries” were rhetorical. The only reason this story has any legs is that the librarian was one of several people Palin asked to resign because they had been past supporters of her opponent in the mayoral election. This gives the appearance that Palin was punishing the librarian for being unwilling to comply with possible censorship demands. Let me reiterate that no one is claiming Palin actually called for the censorship of any book – she merely asked if the librarian would do so upon request.

If this story that Palin was trying to intimidate the librarian into censoring books is true, I would find it troubling but hardly a deal breaker. I don’t put it in the same category as Hillary Clinton in 2005, stating ex officio as the junior Senator from New York, that Congress should regulate videogames and other interactive media (see New junk science from the APA). There was absolutely no ambiguity about Hillary’s position, which directly violates the U.S. Constitution.

The fact that Palin denied back in 1996, when the issue arose, that she had any intent to censor books suggests that, even if she did, she rethought it and decided not to act. Unless this is part of a larger pattern of Clinton-style abuse of power, I’m inclined to do no more than flag it and move on.

Since my last posting, the oil bubble has indeed burst as predicted, falling nearly 1/3 from the high point. Even though this has dropped gasoline prices below $4/bbl, the public continues to favor domestic drilling.

Meanwhile, in the Presidential contest, Barack Obama picked Senator Joe Biden and McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as their respective running mates. Both picks surprised me.

It’s hard to imagine a worse pick than Biden, a pompous blowhard and non-stop gaff machine. If Obama wasn’t going to pick Hillary – a mistake in my view – then he should have picked a respected, center-left DLC type like Evan Bayh. I believe that Obama chose Biden because he wanted someone who wouldn’t upstage him and who was also from the left wing of the party.

McCain’s choice of Palin surprised me only because I didn’t even think she was on his list. I became interested in Palin a few months ago. After watching videos of a 2006 Gubernatorial debate and later interviews on news shows in which she talked about energy policy, drilling in ANWR, and suing the EPA for putting the Polar Bear on the endangered list, I decided she should be on the ticket. That McCain chose Palin indicates that developing domestic energy resources is going to be one of his key issues – she has made herself an expert in oil and natural gas. I remain convinced that this is a winning issue for the GOP.

Last night, Palin gave her acceptance speech as the GOP Vice Presidential nominee. There has been all sorts of comment on Palin’s performance throughout the blogosphere – I’ll not add to it here except to say that it was generally well received. My wife and I watched the speech on C-SPAN and we digitally recorded it at the same time in the event that there was some sort of familial interruption. In the course of the speech, there were a number of shots of Palin from behind the podium, looking out over the crowd. From some of these behind-the-back shots, it was possible to see the teleprompter. I noted early on that what was on the teleprompter tracked what she was saying. Subsequently, there were several more shots in which the teleprompter was visible and nothing appeared amiss, though I can’t aver that I was paying it close attention after the first time I saw it working.

Today, a report circulated that Palin (and previous speaker Rudy Giuliani) had problems with the teleprompter such that scroll control was lost and it ran ahead of her place in the speech, making it unusable to her. This story was carried by major media including CNN, FOX, and the Wall Street Journal. Supposedly, an early ad lib (she said the difference between a “hockey mom” and a pit bull was lipstick) was associated with this failure. Since I’m very good at picking out obscure details in movies and videos and I hadn’t seen a failure, I wondered if this story was true. The only way to know for certain was to view the recording and see it showed the teleprompter had failed.

I’ve now run through the entire DVR of Palin’s speech and I can state that there is no evidence of an early failure or a failure half the way through that forced her to spend the rest of the time relying on her memory and her notes. Following is my “log” of the recording:

10:29 EDT – speech starts. I used the clock that was on the upper right of the C-SPAN image rather than the DVR time to track things so times are only to the nearest minute. Still, this should be close enough for someone else to verify my findings.

10:41 EDT – 12 minutes into speech – first shot of teleprompter, image was indistinct.

10:42 EDT – 13 minutes into speech – teleprompter visible and working.

10:47 EDT – 18 minutes into speech – teleprompter working.

10:50 EDT – 21 minutes into speech – teleprompter working.

10:54 EDT – 25 minutes into speech – teleprompter working

11:00 EDT – 31 minutes into speech – first shot I couldn’t see the teleprompter clearly. However, a few seconds later there was another shot and this time the teleprompter was visible and working.

11:08 EDT – Speech ends.

Every time that the teleprompter was visible it was working, by which I mean that the words on the teleprompter matched what Palin was saying. The teleprompter didn’t fail halfway through and then become unusable for the remainder of the speech. It is certainly possible that it may have gotten ahead or fallen behind on a few occasions but it was clearly functional shortly thereafter.

At a minimum, the claim that Palin had to do the last half of the speech without the teleprompter is busted. Considering that the video provides a sort of random sample of the teleprompter working throughout the speech, I’d say it is reasonable to question the weaker form of the claim that the teleprompter was failing intermittently though that claim may be true.

As I write this, the nominees presumptive of their respective parties are Barack Obama and John McCain. Although I fully expect the oil bubble to burst at some point in the not too distant future, with gasoline topping $4 a gallon, McCain and the Republicans have found a very strong issue in calling for the expansion of domestic oil exploration and easing restrictions on new refinery construction. What makes this issue so strong is that two-thirds of the public believe that offshore oil exploration should resume and, further, that it would reduce gasoline prices. Moreover, for over thirty years the Democratic Party has ”been in thrall to the eco-fascists” and has resolutely opposed expanding every conventional domestic energy source in favor of expensive and utterly impractical “alternatives”. Far from being the party of the working man, the Democratic Party is the party of the snail darter, the spotted owl, and the polar bear.

The Democrats have been thrown on the defensive and, unable to change their radical environmental, anti-technology ideology, have been forced to rely on bumper sticker rhetoric: “You can’t drill your way out of scarcity”. Worse, for them, some of their confreres are beginning to say what they really think: U.S. Representatives Maxine Waters of California and Maurice Hinchey of New York have called for nationalizing the oil industry or parts thereof. With Obama being the most left-wing member of the Senate, suspected by many of being a closet Marxist, this offers the GOP the perfect opportunity for a viral video and/or a commercial calling attention to the stark difference between the two parties. Here is what I envision:

FADE IN: A red flag with hammer and sickle is waving. An a cappella male chorus sings “The Internationale” in Russian (I like the first a cappella version here). First, a picture of Karl Marx appears. This fades and is replaced with a clip of Lenin speaking. There follows a clip of Stalin reviewing a May Day Parade, Krushchev banging his shoe at the U.N., Fidel Castro haranguing a crowd, Leonid Brezhnev reviewing yet another May Day Parade, then, abruptly the music stops in mid-phrase and there stands Ronald Reagan delivering the lines, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Cut to a scene of cheering crowds tearing down the Berlin wall. FADE OUT
FADE IN: A clip of Maxine Waters threatening to [sic] “socialize” the oil companies. As she speaks, the camera should begin to pull back and it becomes apparent that the image is on a TV. This is replaced by Maurice Hinchey talking about nationalizing the oil refineries. Pulling back farther, the camera reveals a couple of guys (they should be identifiable as “Reagan Democrats” – t-shirts and/or baseball caps with union slogans) watching the TV. One turns to the other and says, “Gee, I thought we won the Cold War.”
FADE OUT: The words, “VOTE REPUBLICAN” appear.

I think this could easily be a 60 second commercial though it would work as a 2 minute viral video as well.

If anyone in the RNC reads this, I give you full rights to put it together. If anyone else wants to make it, contact me first.

Although it has been an interesting political season, even the prospect of an Obama-Hillary / Hillary-Obama shotgun wedding officiated by Howard Dean has been insufficient to motivate me to blog. However, a couple of recent events merit some commentary.

The first was from early last month when Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, admitted that the release of the Key Judgments summary of the NIE to the public created the false impression that Iran was no longer developing nuclear weapons. During the questioning by Senator Evan Bayh (D – Indiana), the following exchange occurred:

MR. MCCONNELL: I think I would change the way that we describe nuclear program; I mean, put it up front, a little diagram, what are the component parts so that the reader could quickly grasp that a portion of it, I would argue, maybe even at least significant portion, was halted and there are other parts that continue.

SEN. BAYH: Well, just to clarify the record, and I’m referring only to the public NIE. And I’ve read it. My synopsis of it — and I’d be interested if any of you would disagree with this — was that they had an active — all three components: fissile material creation, weaponization, delivery systems. All those were going forward. They decided a few years ago to suspend one component; as you characterize it, the least consequential of the three — at least temporarily they decided to suspend it. They could recommence that at any point in time.

MR. MCCONNELL: They could.

SEN. BAYH: It would be very difficult for us, as I think you pointed out, to know when they have recommenced that, and ultimately, given their industrial and technological capabilities, they are likely to be successful. We don’t know exactly when, but ultimately they’re likely to be successful.

MR. MCCONNELL: Yes, sir.

SEN. BAYH: Is that a fair synopsis?

MR. MCCONNELL: That’s exactly right. And that’s what the unclassified — if you read them all the way through, that’s unclassified key judgment — make that point, and then there’s the full body of the 140 pages also, and (they did make that ?) point.

SEN. BAYH: Well, so my question to you is, you know, it’s difficult when we just, you know, have one footnote that kinds of clarifies, as I say — how can you and your people go about presenting this in a way that is more likely to have a balanced presentation of your beliefs, to avoid the kind of problem we’ve now got ourselves in going forward? And how can you think through the consequences of the report? Because it’s had unintended consequences that in my own view are damaging to the national security interests of our country.

MR. MCCONNELL: Sir, it’s a challenge. We tried, in the time we had left, to do just what you said. I thought at the moment, at that point in time, we had gotten good balance. In retrospect, I — as I mentioned, I would do some things differently.

[Emphasis added, otherwise unedited]

We need not concern ourselves with the remainder of the exchange, where McConnell offers the absurd and self-serving argument that the release of the Key Judgments summary didn’t damage U.S. national security by making it more difficult to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

The establishment media gave McConnel’s admissions about the NIE scant coverage – obviously it was too embarrassing for journalists to acknowledge both their excessive credulity and ignorance about such an important topic. Besides, given the political bias of the media, the fact that so many prominent Democrats – in particular, Democratic Presidential candidates – relied on the flawed NIE to attack the Bush Doctrine undermines their claims of foreign policy expertise. It is only acceptable for the establishment media to question Bush’s expertise.

The second development is that there is good reason to question the NIE’s assertion that weaponization, in the form of warhead development, was halted by Iran in 2003. Recall that back in December, I stated my view that warhead development had not ceased at all. Now, a 13 March 2008 article in Jane’s International Defense Review (paid subscription required) titled “Evidence emerges of Iran’s continued nuclear weapons research” vindicates my assertion. Jane’s claims to have seen evidence of long term weapons development from “a source connected to a Western intelligence service” and that said evidence was “verified by a number of reliable independent sources in Vienna.” This evidence relates to developments in the implosion technology necessary for a plutonium device and essential in reducing the amount of fissile material needed for a uranium device. According to Jane’s, Iran has made “great strides” in this critical technology. Further, this weaponization program has been ongoing, which flatly contradicts the NIE “judgment” that Iran suspended that part of nuclear program back in 2003. Q.E.D.

The article goes on to discuss the organization of the weapons program (known as AMAD - full Farsi name: Sazemaneh Tarhe Amade Vije - Organisation for Planning and Special Supplies, OPSS) as well as specifics about the technologies under development. Aside from implosion technology, AMAD, is also developing a “payload with a diameter of 60 cm” with an eye toward fitting this inside the conical warhead of the Shahab-3”. Jane’s notes that this is a departure from the “tri-conic” or baby bottle warhead variants observed 3 years ago in a military parade which were thought to be a nuclear warhead design.

About the only positive thing that can be said about the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is that its schedule has been “moving to the right” and is progressing slower than might be expected. This is no argument in favor of complacency. Iran is obviously very close to having fully weaponized nuclear – I maintain thermonuclear – devices. If Bush doesn’t take action, it will probably be too late for the next President to do anything except develop policies for how to deal with a nuclear Iran.

I hadn’t planned to comment on the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate – others with much better credentials than I have done so (notably John Bolton in the Washington Post). However, none of them offered the best refutation, although Henry Kissinger in a 13 December editorial came close. Kissinger pointed out that the “Key Judgments” part of the NIE that was released to the public had its most widely quoted statement footnoted with information that it was the construction of warheads that Iran had halted. This, said Kissinger, is only one aspect of a nuclear weapons program and “not even the most significant one.”

The Key Judgments is only a few pages, most of which is explanatory material for a few conclusory statements. The only one that matters is “A”, which begins:

A. We judge with high confidence that in the fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program;…

This phrase is footnoted:

For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

So, what does “design and weaponization” mean? Kissinger is correct that this relates to having a nuclear device that can be deployed in the field and used as a weapon. For example, the first true thermonuke (that is, hydrogen bomb) was a huge construction of piping and cryotanks that used liquid hydrogen. This U.S. built device could never be used a weapon. When the Soviets detonated their first thermonuke it was a lithium deuteride “dry bomb” dropped from a bomber. Thus, although the U.S. detonated the first thermonuke, the Soviets were first to weaponize.

Kissinger and the other critics have said Statement A greatly overstates the case. I believe the better argument is that the qualifying footnote’s assertion concerning design and weaponization is wrong. This can be shown by reference to open, unclassified sources.

In September of this year, the Iranians held a military parade at which a supposedly new missile called the Ghadr was put on display. Jane’s (paid subscription only) had an article about this “new” missile, which analysts said was actually a modified version of the Shahab-3 missile first seen in 2004. Here are some details from a December 2004 article in Jane’s Defense Weekly:

The missile has a modified nose section allowing it to hold a larger warhead and thus provide additional room for a nuclear device. Israeli officials have said the larger nose section is capable of separation and visually appears similar to that used on the Russian SS-9 intercontinental ballistic missile. “It is not a copy of a known missile but the new Shahab has a major-league design. It’s clear that it is the work of seasoned missile engineers, probably Russian, rather than an experimental beginners ” version, added Rubin.

Such extra room is vital as Iranian nuclear engineers would face major technical challenges in making the country’s first nuclear weapon light enough and small enough to fit on its existing missiles, particularly without benefit of having conducted full-scale nuclear weapons tests. The weapon is believed by US officials to be an indigenous design although knowledge gained from blueprints of a working, but too large nuclear weapon, provided by the Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan would be helpful to the effort. If true, the efforts would signify that IRAN is further advanced in its nuclear weapons programme than previously known.

According to the 2004 article, the program to develop the improved Shahab delivery system was called Ghadr-101. It is significant that the missile on display in 2007 is called the Ghadr. It suggests that what was seen in 2004 was a prototype and the 2007 version is the production model. Ironically, the missile in the parade had written on it, “Israel must be eliminated.”

Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve written about Iranian missile development. I’ve also said that the Iranians would almost certainly deploy 1 megaton thermonukes at the start – all it takes is 7 to obliterate Israel. Missile and warhead technology is probably the most difficult technology to master. The evidence is overwhelming that the Iranians have accomplished this. The biggest technological hurdle in building a uranium-based, first generation thermonuke is amassing enough highly enriched uranium. The Iranians have enrichment technology in hand – even the writers of the NIE acknowledge that Iran already has enough centrifuges to construct a U-235 weapon by 2009. This, too, is an overestimate - assuming that Iran installs no more centrifuges the date would be late 2008 – as I’ve shown in several previous blog entries, assuming only standard centrifuges, 3,000 will produce around 30 kg of highly enriched uranium (advanced centrifuges might produce close to twice this amount). Right now, the Iranians probably have a number of warheads waiting only for uranium, polonium-210, and tritium to turn them into weapons.

If the missile that will carry the thermonuke has been in a military parade open to the foreign press, why doesn’t the Intel bureaucracy know about it? John Bolton suggests that the writers of the NIE had a political motive. Possibly. However, I attribute it to the fact that bureaucracies are amplifiers of stupidity.

From their inception, the CIA and its siblings in civilian intelligence have demonstrated a remarkable inability to gather accurate information about our adversaries. The Soviets detonated their first A-bomb years ahead of the estimate provided by the Intel bureaucrats. The Intel bureaucrats were surprised again when the Soviets air dropped their first thermonuke – it was a double surprise because the Soviet thermonuke was fully weaponized, which briefly put the Soviets technically ahead of the U.S. Of course, most people know about the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs fiasco and there’s even a movie satirizing declassified information about the CIA’s laughable attempts to kill Castro. Most recently we have the missing stockpiles of WMD’s in Iraq. These are just a few examples off the top of my head – to properly catalogue the instances of CIA/Intel ineptitude over the past 60 years would require multiple volumes. Some historian really should undertake the task.

The evidence in the public domain that Iran is very close to having thermonukes and a way to put them on target is overwhelming. The fact that the Israeli government, which has access to classified information, has taken the unprecedented step of trying to convince the American government to repudiate the NIE’s conclusion should be considered dispositive.

At this critical time, the NIE has apparently so cowed George W. Bush that he has abandoned the Bush doctrine. We are now living in the worst of all possible worlds. The U.S. will not denuclearize Iran and, by sitting athwart the best attack routes, makes it nearly impossible for Israel to take action. If there is a nuke war in the Mid-East, what will be the consequence for the Intel agencies? The answer is: nothing. Actually, failure usually brings more funding – “if only we’d had more money we could have done a better job.” The stupidity of bureaucracies – especially government ones – is essentially limitless except for one area: self-preservation.