Voice of the Wogs: Much Ado about Nuclear Doomsday

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

[The authentic voice of the Wogs -- resentfully whistling past the
graveyard, justifiably angry at the Big White Bullies who are
wagging their fingers, and quite accurately pointing out the US "zeal
for doomsday scenarios." But it doesn't comfort much -- the fact that
"jittery Americans," as the Brit Independent calls them, are flocking to
watch a nuclear doomsday fantasy in their movie theaters only means
that they are being prepared for it in their future, and not just in
their nightmares.

With unconscious irony Rajghatta, from the Jewel in the Crown colony
of The Empire, chooses a corruption of a Shakespearean title -- "Much
Ado about *Nothing* -- to describe nuclear devastation.  We hope he's
right, and that the wogs of the world have more sense than the white
boys, despite their desire to play with their toys.]


The Times of india - June 1, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=11698407


Much ado about nuclear doomsday

CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

WASHINGTON, June 1--There is an apocryphal story about a nuclear war
drill in the United States. The sirens go off and Americans dash to
their cars, load them up with wife, kids, dog, cat, fishing gear,
baseball bats, beach towels, mother-in-law, and drive out
frantically...into a traffic snarl.

Contrast that with India, where despite the Americans sounding every
single bell and whistle about impending apocalyptic doom in the
region, people are loading up their cars with wife, kids, dog,
cricket ball, bat, wickets, mother-in-law, bahadur, and driving out
leisurely... into a traffic jam, of course.

Really, you ought to be here to get sense of the hysteria being made.
To hear it from Bush administration officials, nuclear war is almost
upon the sub-continent. Irresponsible brown folk will vapourise
millions in a frenzy of irrational behaviour. Washington has already
issued the May Day call and Americans better get the hell out of the
region before they are reduced to putty. Television and radio
stations are full of the most fearful stories about how many people
will die in a nuclear exchange and the long-term effect of
radioactive fall-out. They are even digging up passages from the Rig
Veda.

All this from a country which is the only one in history to press the
nuclear button. And which was far more eyeball-to-eyeball with the
former Soviet Union than Pakistan is with India today, and who,
between them, stacked up a trifling 30,000 or so nuclear weapons --
enough to decimate the world many times over (where could the rest of
the world have evacuated then?) And a country where there's a greater
likelihood of dirty nuclear weapons going off in New York or
Washington than anything bursting over Karachi or Mumbai.

None of this is to detract or dilute from the seriousness of the
situation in the sub-continent. But there is something unsettling
about the readiness with the way Americans embrace the doomsday
scenario. Just as there is something unnerving about the way Indians
deny the same scenario. A billion people are going about their
everyday business with karmic calm.

Some of the quotes from Indians (in the American media) are
unsurpassed for their sang froid. "God will protect us in our fight
against Pakistan," one book vendor told the paper, rejecting the idea
that he even needed a shelter against nuclear fall-out. While the
Pentagon is making preparations to airlift and ship out American
nationals from India, The Washington Post reported over the weekend,
Indians were more worried about the monsoon clouds than the mushroom
cloud.

Amid all this, Americans have once again succumbed to their boundless
zeal for doomsday scenarios with the release of The Sum of All Fears,
a potential blockbuster based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same
name. In the movie, Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford in other
sequels but replaced by the stud-ly Ben Affleck here) is a greenhorn
CIA analyst whose specialty is Russian political history. When an
unknown character named Nemerov unexpectedly becomes president of
that Russia, the CIA decides that he is a nuclear hawk, especially
after it's discovered that a Russian nuclear warhead is missing. But
Ryan/Affleck knows otherwise, even as the warhead is making its way
toward the United States to spark off WW III; the Russians are now
good guys and the real villains are Arab terrorists. Who could have
guessed?

But after the India-Pakistan spat it's a safe bet who will be the new
villains. Already, stories are tumbling out of the closet. According
to one account that has surfaced during the current episode (flash
back!), India had decided to "take out" the Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear
reactor in 1984. Pakistan then sent an explicit message to then-Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi that if India attacked Kahuta, the Pakistan
would strike as many nuclear installations as they could in India,
especially the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. But how could they do
it? -- the F-16s had no range and the Pakistan did not have
refuelling capacity they were asked. Simple, the Pakistanis replied.
Their pilots would drop the bombs and then crash their jets into the
reactors in a suicide mission.

The India-Pakistan crisis may end in a whimper, but Hollywood is
certainly going to get many a buck for the bang that hopefully will
never be.
 
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