How's the Other Plan working out?

Fat Man and Little Boy
(manufactured by a responsible sovereign nation)

Vleeptron wants to return to this business of nuclear weapons, how they, the fissile metals they're made of, and the technology and experts who design and manufacture them have spread to so many nations of the Earth since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs of 1945.

But first a few footnotes to the Ramadan Kareem business -- a modest proposal for Jews and Christians just to prepare to wish our Muslim neighbors a good and fulfilling holy month as it approaches.

We mentioned that Pakistan, a secularized Muslim nation, possesses atomic weapons.

We mentioned the terribly obvious: that since 2001, and with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Jews, Christians and Muslims have all come to a constant seething boil of Anger and Outrage against each other.

But we neglected the largely Hindu nation of India, and its atomic bombs. Pakistan developed its bombs almost entirely with India in mind, and contrariwise. Pakistan has also been extremely generous with technological help in helping other nations join the Atomic Bomb Club (although it has subsequently apologized for its liberal exporting help).

Since their independence from Great Britain in 1948, Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have essentially been in a constant state of war or pre-war border tension. Now the tension is nuclear-tipped. Pakistan is currently ruled by a military dictatorship. India remains a parliamentary democracy, but the popular party politics of both nations have institutionalized their mutual hatred and military hostility.

If, as suspected, the Shia Muslim theocracy in Iran eventually develops nuclear weapons, they will be pointing them primarily at their traditional neighbor-enemy, Iraq.

And we mention again American bomb physicist Ted Taylor's warning from the 1970s ... that the technology to make atomic bombs is so relatively simple and so widely spread around the world that it is nearly (or already) in the reach of sub-national groups. They call themselves freedom fighters. Sovereign nations call them terrorists.

If one of these things goes off in my neighborhood, I won't care if it was detonated by attractive young cheerleaders, or by circus clowns.

All this nuclear weapons proliferation floats along on a boiling sea of violent, murderous, suicidal hatred between the world's great religions (though, to the best of my knowledge, no nominally Buddhist nation or subnational group has ambitions to possess nuclear weapons).

Last night I had a brief Internet Relay Chat relapse and checked into the chatroom called #bangalore, a city in India which has recently become famous around the world as a surprisingly sophisticated and influential center of computer high technology and industry.

Probably because he was curious to know what a Yank was doing in his cyber-Bangalore, a "blore" restaurateur private-chatted me. Everything was going pleasantly. Until I innocently asked him how recent (but hesitant, tenuous and fragile) peace initiatives between India and Pakistan were going.

He wasn't particularly angry at me for asking. He simply said that all Muslims should die quickly and painfully. And more stuff along those lines.

I assume if I'd gone into #islamabad or #karachi , I could have chatted with a Muslim restaurateur who would have expressed the same feelings toward Hindus.

In Tickling the Dragon's Tail, I wrote about some technical aspects of making atomic bombs.

But the thousands of atomic and thermonuclear bombs now generously spread all over the world are no threat to anyone without the Key Ingredient:

Mass Violent Religious Hatred.

In a world without homicidal, suicidal, psychotic, fanatic religious and ethnic hatred and suspicion, nuclear weapons are really safe as milk.

I hope this modest idea of wishing our Muslim neighbors a good Ramadan a few weeks from now has some modest effect on reducing this seething atmosphere of religious hatred. From there, perhaps Vleeptron will make similar suggestions to make it a little easier for Hindus and Muslims to be respectful and peaceful neighbors. After that, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

(Suicide bombing appears to have first emerged as a tactic of violent struggle with the Tamil Tigers' fight for independence.)

And so on and so forth.

Pretty naive and silly, huh? Respect and neighborly behavior between religious and ethnic enemies. Vleeptron apologizes for being so naive and silly.

Well ... please Leave A Comment on the Officially Sanctioned Alternative Plan now in force all over Planet Earth: Violent Hatred as the Political Centerpieces of religious-affiliated sovereign states and subnational groups armed with more and more Nuclear Weapons.

How's that working out?