I am become death

David Thomson (America's pain inside) notes the commercial failure in the U.S. of films dealing explicitly with the Iraq war. That doesn't mean, he says, that American audiences have lost their taste for blood, witness whereto these three: No County for Old Men, There Will be Blood and Sweeney Todd. Thomson concludes:

It seems America is getting ready for a great interior violence. Don't think its civil war was ever settled.

Well maybe. After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And the violence, if/when it comes, may not just be directed inwardly. As Jonathan Schell writes, the U.S. 2001 Nuclear Posture Review envisages:

a permanent new facility [for plutonium pit production]; a new facility for producing tritium, which boosts the yield of thermonuclear weapons; a new intercontinental ballistic missile, to be operational in...2018; a new strategic submarine and a new ballistic missile to go with it, for 2029; a new nuclear-capable bomber for 2040; [etc]...

In the words of Tom Cruise, "we are the authorities".



P.S. The Nuclear Threats Initiative circulates a freeview version of Toward a Nuclear Free World by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn (15 Jan 08). This follows A World Free of Nuclear Weapons by the same authors (4 Jan 07).