Ah, so many fond memories of crouching under a desk or in an elementary school corridor with my hands crossed behind my head to shield me from the flash of the bomb.
And it was educational. I first became conscious of foreign affairs during a "duck and cover" drill the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I searched a classroom globe until I found Cuba (or "Cue-burr" as President Kennedy pronounced it) and tried to imagine how many minutes warning we in the New York suburbs might have if missiles were launched.
Best of all, back then we had cartoon characters and catchy jingles. Try humming this tune the next time you do a D&C drill at your U.S. Embassy workplace:
6 comments:
Great post TSB! Has anyone written the story of or declassified the documents about how the Isreali nuclear program was developed? From those documents you steered me to it sounds like we weren't too happy about it. gwb
TSB: Juan Cole's advises the Arab freedom movement to be very wary of
"democracy". I'm with him and Ralph Nader who says he's tired of trying to warn us about the corporatocracy. gwb
www.juancole.com july6, 2011
Be careful. Be very careful. In my lifetime I have seen the American state spiral down into a brutal tyranny that tortures, spies, union-busts, engages in illegal wars, and plays dirty tricks on dissidents. We used to have something much more like a democracy. Maybe we can learn from you how to safeguard something so precious.
On the Israeli bomb, I'd read The Bomb In The Basement, by an Israeli journalist.
http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Basement-Israel-Nuclear-Means/dp/0743265947
The USG maintained an arms embargo on Israeli and did not help them at all with their bomb or want them to have it. It was France who helped them, with both conventional arms and nukes.
On Arab freedom movements, if history is any guide, we can trust them to know exactly what to do with democracy, only it isn't what Juan Cole would like them to do.
Democracy invaribly brings the most extreme Islamist parties to power - e.g., HAMAS in the Palestinian Authority - or at least to an electoral victory that then brings on a military coup - e.g., Algiers - and those are precriptions for a "brutal tyranny that tortures, spies" etc., just like we see in all the non-democratic Arab states.
I don't know of any Jeffersonian democracies, or even any close approximations, that are outside of Western civilization and the Enlightenment tradition.
Maybe the 'Arab Spring' will be a complete exception.
Thanks TSB! I think I'll look for a copy of "The Sampson Option" by Sy Hersch (1991) since I like thrillers beter than state dept archives. It looks like LBJ swung private US financing toward the project. Amazing that Hersch could figure this out by 1991! gwb
According to TBITB, it was LBJ who gave Israel a critical assist by looking the other way when they were in the last stages of development. Then, the Nixon administration was faced with a fait accompli, and its biggest concern was that Israel keep their bomb a secret at that point rather than publicize it and upset Nixon's non-proliferation treaty initiative.
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