Loving The Bomb Still Stranger Than Fiction?

An unclassified 2013 Pentagon-funded study addressed whether a rogue billionaire could make a nuclear weapon & sell its product for a handsome profit? Anyone got $1B, a nice assembly line & 5 yrs to tinker?

Of course, it’s the DOD’s job to constantly peer into the future & think up solutions to foreseeable problems. Nothing ever comes of most such Q & As. On the other hand, as WSJ guest author Sharon Weinberger noted, this particular Q & A considered by a dream team of experts may have plenty of relevance TODAY. That’s because as implausible the study’s premise may have been then, “much has changed in the world” since. For one thing, billionaire entrepreneurs now control once fanciful technologies outside of federal contracting focused on military development. Think Musk’s network of Starlink satellites, she says, “that can change the course of wars” as other “venture capitalists are flocking to the defense sector” with dollar signs in their eyes. Consider, too, abroad, where Wagner Group’s mercenaries built a global empire stretching from Europe to Africa & showed how they could more than just meddle in Ukraine.

So, this is no longer a “Oppenheimer” aka government-controlled world like the one depicted in last summer’s blockbuster. How to build the damn thing is even on the Internet for all to see. Nor is the world in short supply of crazies. Remember the 1960’s “Dr. Strangelove? In that flick, a “mad” general thought “fluoridation” of our water supply was a Russkie plot to undermine American virility AND HAD TO BE STOPPED by a pre-emptive nuclear attack. Are some of the ideas coming out of woke mania & infesting corporate America any crazier? The good news, perhaps, is that it really does take a CRAZY to get into the “A-Bomb” business & Weinberger concedes it’s still pretty hard to cover up the large facilities needed to get nuclear products to market. Now, about those biological weapons …

Davd Soul