FFWD Weekly
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| VIEWPOINT In the last of his 89 remarkable years, the South African novelist and laureate Sir Laurens van der Post first laid eyes on Calgary. For half-an-hour he held a normally numbed convocation audience spellbound, as he told a cautionary tale about man's condition in the late 20th century. Speaking in beautiful allegory, he told of how our geography paralleled the greatest challenges of modern civilization; the land, representing our humanity, meeting the mountains, symbolic of our intellectual pursuits to - and the dangers of - our scientific knowledge of nature, outstripping our human knowledge of ourselves. His words resonated this week as the earth under the Indian sub-continent shuddered with explosions from Pakistan's nuclear tests explosions. The aftermath of these tests, triggered in response to India's successful tests earlier this year, is uncertainty over whether science wasn't simply being driven again by the darker sides of human nature. One hardly has to be a sheet-wearing xenophobe to be unnerved by the sight of crowds, drunk on the swill of nationalism, celebrating atomic explosions by firing off live ammunition in the streets. Joining the nuclear club may be the national equivalent to successful penile enhancement surgery, but keep it in your pants, boys. It is an unseemly spectacle. A repressive dictatorship, ruled as much by religious zeal as rational thought, unable to properly feed and clothe itself, squandering its scarce resources in pursuit of the power to split the atom and spill forth its guts of fire on its neighbors. It is hardly what Prometheus intended. But will the potent combination of hot heads and a simmering war in Kashmir inevitably flare into a nuclear conflagration? We have, at least, historical experience on our side. Contrary to what our most dogmatic peaceniks might preach, the two living generations who have never experienced war are largely the progeny of the nuclear threat. It is easy to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis without giving adequate emphasis to its defining fact: not a shot was fired. Even dictators, it seems, are not immune to the logic of nuclear deterrence. We may abhor many of Pakistan's practices, but we cannot dismiss its leaders as fools. Their main regional ally, communist China, has no interest in a regional nuclear conflict. Although China may ensure that its confederate keeps pace with India's technological advances, its motive will be to maintain an imbalance in armaments which could encourage adventurism, not to bring radioactive fallout raining down on their common Asian home. It may be morbid to say, but watching India and Pakistan come to terms with the landscape of nuclear reality will be a fascinating field experiment in political science. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists may turn their tacky little Doomsday Clock forward a few minutes over these events, but it is entirely arguable that two more names have been added to the register of nations who simply cannot risk going to war with one another. Only time will tell whether they look down from the atomic mountain and are moved by the beauty and inviolability of the land below, or turn and leap into the precipice. |
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