I have been reading Charles Krauthammer’s
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions,
Pastimes and Politics when I came to this article published in Time in
2006. Could not be more relevant today.
Time | Thursday, March 30, 2006
Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote. "And I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless."
Feynman was convinced man had finally invented
something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For
six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe
Feynman's pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most
aggressive world power, Stalin's Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never
used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either.
Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while,
dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal.
But that's the point. We're now at the dawn of
an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the
usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power
and will soon be wielding nuclear power.
We have difficulty understanding the mentality
of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the
men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who
chant "Death to America"--and Denmark(!)--and embrace the glory and
romance of martyrdom.
This atavistic love of blood and death and,
indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new--medieval Europe had an
abundance of millennial Christian sects--but until now it has never had the
means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.
That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of
nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its
President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent
believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of
the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in
official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He
reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last
September, he felt a halo around him and for "those 27 or 28 minutes, the
leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and
it opened their eyes to receive" his message. He believes that the Islamic
revolution's raison d'être is to prepare the way for the messianic
redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and
chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear
flame?
Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is
either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And
Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping
develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by
similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If
nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one
but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will
the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.
That will present the world with two futures.
The first is Feynman's vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second,
perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day,
is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain
itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism--a self-imposed expulsion from
the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom.
Can there be a third future? That will depend
on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case.
It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world
response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly
useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have
brought us to only the most tentative of steps--referral to a Security Council
that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and
openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an
Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have
reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a
great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for
those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.
Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and
we've had nukes for exactly 61. No one knows the precise prospects for human
extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate
odds. If he were to watch us today about to let loose the agents of extinction,
he'd call a halt to all bridge building