The Paradox of Nuclear Power by James Mahaffey

Radiation. Just the naked word, radiation, is enough to make us uncomfortable. The word carries a sinister, dangerous under-meaning, even to someone who has worked closely with it. I have stared, by way of a mirror, at the center of a nuclear reactor core at full power. I have gazed down into a swimming pool holding 700,000 curies of cobalt-60, I have dangled a californium-252 source at the end of a 10-foot pole, and still "radiation" gets to me. Our chimes are still vibrating, from being banged roughly during the periods of The Fantasy and The Puzzle, the newsreels of Chernobyl* and Hiroshima/Nagasaki* still burned in our brains. Radiation remains secretly harmful. You can just be standing there, feeling nothing unusual, while being killed by it, never mind being actively hit with it via a meltdown or a bomb.

The practical mode of nuclear power, fission, releases a tremendous blast of radiation in a wide spectrum, and extraordinary precautions must be exercised to prevent it from sterilizing the vicinity of the reaction. However, to put it in perspective, a major component of The Paradox of nuclear power is that far more people die each year of radiation-induced disease from standing out in the sun than have ever died from the (peaceful)application of nuclear power. There is, after all, radiation all around us. There has always been radiation penetrating our bodies, 24 hours a day.

I drew pay at Georgia Tech Research Institute for 25 years, with my office in the Electronics Research Building, or the ERB. It was a serviceable building, Spartan by contemporary standards, three stories, with an over-built steel frame, filled in with concrete blocks, completed in 1966. In the next lot, just north of the ERB, they had built the Frank H. Neely Nuclear Research Center in 1963. It contained a faithful copy of the 5-megawatt CP-5 heavy water reactor at the Argonne National Lab, hand-built and looking as if no expense was spared.

Being a nuclear research reactor, radiation monitoring at the Neely Center was taken quite seriously. Not only was the inside of the air-sealed reactor containment building monitored continuously at several key locations, the entire facility was wired for radiation detection, with a staff of trained health physicists constantly vigilant. One sunny day in in 1965, all hell broke loose. Radiation alarm bells started going off, indicating that there was an unintended critical mass of fuel somewhere inside. That was impossible. All the uranium in the facility was accounted for. The health physics team grabbed their portable counters, switched them on, clicked down-scale, and started scanning the floor to locate the source. The electronics maintenance team checked the alarm settings and started testing the equipment, beginning with the power supplies. The Geiger-counter-equipped health physicists followed the radiation out the front door and up the hill, south, to the adjacent building, which was under construction. Their alarms were being rattled, not by a mass of uranium accidentally dumped on the floor of a nuclear laboratory, but by a newly delivered load of construction materials for the seemingly benign Electronics Research Building.

The ERB was made of an enormous pile of concrete blocks which had naturally been supplied by the lowest bidder, a phosphate mine in Florida. A Florida phosphate digger makes a strip mine, and there is a lot of waste material that must be stored or gotten rid of. It made perfect sense to bake the tailings, form them into concrete blocks, and sell them for cheap in Georgia. It at least gets rid of the stuff. But there's a catch. Phosphate mines are unusually rich in uranium. Just about every dirt, rock, soil, sand or dust sample in the world contains at least a small amount of uranium. It is the most universally distributed material on Earth, albeit in diluted quantities; but phosphate mines are so uranium-heavy that the tailings are now considered to be a strategic resource. The ERB basically amounted to a big pile of uranium ore, and it was gradually decaying away into lead, shooting off a variety of rays, particles, and radioactive 'daughter products'.

The unusual nature of our building was never officially mentioned to the occupants, for fear of a stampede, but it was the talk of health physics meetings nationwide. I gained some amusement by parking a scintillation counter in the corner of my office and watching the rate meter climb off-scale to the right. Professionally, we call it "pegging the needle". Occasionally a colleague would see my radiation instrument going wild and ask, "This isn't going to...harm me, is it?

"Probably not," I would shrug. "By the time the cancer kicks in, you'll probably have heart disease." My sarcasm was often not appreciated.

In 2007 both buildings were torn down to make way for the new Nanotechnology Research Center. What is interesting is the way the two buildings were demolished. The reactor was covered with an air-tight plastic tent and was ever so carefully broken down piece by piece, over the course of months, extremely expensive work. The reactor containment structure had for all its life been kept spotlessly clean. Every surface was wiped, cleaned, polished and scrubbed to prevent the slightest buildup of anything radioactive and any hint of contamination would be noted on the constantly swooping instruments and treated rigorously. You could literally eat off the floor in that building. There was probably no public health hazard from striking that place, even without all the plastic sheeting.

The ERB, on the other hand, was blown down by a bulldozer and wrecking ball one work-day afternoon as the students and faculty strolled by. Three guys with garden hoses tried to keep down the choking dust as it wafted out of the wreckage, coating everything and everybody, deep down into their lungs, with pulverized, medium grade uranium ore. A plume of gray concrete dust drifted slowly over the campus, raining down what we used to call "fallout".

See what I mean, when I call it The Paradox? Much effort and millions of dollars were put into protecting the people on the Georgia Tech campus from radiation, but all the effort may have been directed into the wrong coordinates. The people were actually protected from something much more important than the inhalation of uranium. They were protected from the perception of radiation contamination. It will be hard to prove that anyone on campus on the day the ERB came down dies of lung cancer because of the dust, and I highly doubt that anyone will, but the perception of radiation exposure due to a decommissioned research reactor, if allowed to propagate uncontrolled, could bring down the trillion-dollar nuclear power industry. Tearing down a nuclear facility in the city of Atlanta in full public view in a plastic bubble showed good faith, even if it had the reality component of Disney World. The public is hyper-sensitive to the issue of industrial radiation contamination, and the psychology of it is very powerful. The general feeling took decades to fully develop, and the excesses of the Age of Wild Experimentation did not help dampen the growth of radiation anxiety.



*There were 55 recorded deaths from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, and many large, non-fatal doses. To be fair, it must be noted that 171,000 people died in China in 1975 when the Banqiao Dam failed, 18,000 people died in Bhopal, India, in 1984 when a valve was left open in a Union Carbide pesticides plant, and in London, England, 12,000 people died in a frightfully thick fog from sulfurous coal burning in 1952.


* A short time after the bombing of these cities they were both struck by a typhoon which washed most of the radioactive dust lingering in these cities to the bottom of the sea, rendering them habitable.

Without Fidel by Anne Louise Bardach

The first obituaries for Fidel Castro were published in December 1956. It was then that the government of President Fulgencio Batista duped a gullible UPI correspondent named Francis McCarthy into reporting that Fidel Castro, and his brother Raul, had been killed in an ambush. In fact, the thirty-year-old leftist rebel leader was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Desperate to jump-start his revolution- and his life- Castro dispatched an emissary to find an A-list messenger.

After a grueling trek, slogging through the near-impenetrable Sierra, Herbert Mathews, a star correspondent for the New York Times, was told to wait in the wet and chilly woods. It was dawn before Castro, ever mindful of stagecraft, finally descended from the hills- thus establishing his standard operating procedure with the media: Always keep reporters waiting, preferably in the dark, for as long as possible. The result was a heroic portrait that landed on page one of the Times.

From the beginning, newspapers and networks have maintained a standing obituary of Castro. It seemed only wise. After all, several American presidents had decreed that his elimination was a desirable outcome. Then there was the danger of freelance assassins- embittered, hard-wired exile militants- determined to wreak vengeance on the man who, in their view, had hijacked their country.

In the mid-1990s, high-decibel gossip that Castro had barely dodged a rendezvous with his Maker prompted news organizations to freshen up their obituaries. Pundits prepared their sound bytes, ready to yammer for their allotted seventy-five seconds of live television. And again, on June 23, 2001, following Castro's famous desmayo, or fainting spell, and the improvised oratory of his panic-stricken foreign minister, Castro's obits were rushed back to the rewrite desk.

The Castro obit industry cranked up one more time in 2004 when Fidel fell facedown splat to the ground. By then, Castro had made some unusual concessions about his mortality. Subtle but crucial changes signaled concerns for his health and the future of his Revolution. On July 1, 2006, Cuba's Communist Party decreed that the twelve-member Secretariat would be restored, thus enhancing the role of the Party when the transfer of power occurred. The Secretariat had been disbanded in 1992 after the Soviets dropped out of the picture. Henceforth, it would serve as the Party's steering committee and ensure that the Party (backed by the army), and its majority hardliner members, would play a central role in the post-Fidel era.

A month later, when Castro underwent emergency surgery (botched), the obit business roared into a frenzy and has remained on standby ever since. Over the next three years, Castro's obit would be revised monthly, sometimes weekly, at news bureaus around the globe. One reporter at National Public Radio lamented she had taped three Castro obituaries in the first year of his illness. In the second and third years of his infirmities, there would be many more revisions.

"We had to redo our obit several times," Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Miami Herald, said a year after Castro fell ill. Tom Fiedler, the paper's editor from 2001 to 2007, told Editor & Publisher that 'we had plans for Castro's death going back to the 90s. It was truly exhaustive, maybe more detailed than the Pentagon's plan to invade Iraq," Gyllenhaal told me in 2007. "We had internal workshops here about it and had to make big changes twice. Fortunately, we had a dress rehearsal," he added, referring to Castro's close call in July 2006.

A year later, the Herald was not feeling so sanguine. A senior editor, Manny Garcia, discarded traditional newsroom etiquette and penned a dishy, ornery brief in which he compared Castro to a "kidney stone- a constant pain who never seems to go away." Garcia explained his pique. "You gotta understand that the Cadaver-in-Chief is our story and biggest challenge," he complained. " We sit at meetings, long meetings, going over possible stories. Phrasing. Tone. Length. We've got at least five different versions of Fidel's obit, pegged to the time of day or night he dies. We built a Web page for the big day..." For journalists covering Cuba, whom Castro had long held in insect-low regard, the long dying of the Caribbean strongman had become one more indignity to be endured."

Mountain Life by Omar & Najwa Bin Laden

I sat mute, feeling not one jolt of passion for my father's life. I only wanted him to be like other fathers, concerned about his work and his family. I didn't dare tell him the truth, that never would I understand why his mission to save the world was more vital than his duty as a husband and a father. When I sat staring without expressing excitement for his ideas, my father glanced at me in disappointment. He was accustomed to the passion of his warriors, men who hung on his every word, men who slept, ate, and drank only for the destruction of others.

That same passion did not exist in my heart. My father and I rode the rest of the stony highway in cold silence.

My father returned to Jalalabad with big plans. Now that he had the blessing of Mullah Omar, he would send for all his former soldiers. Some of the men had been with him in Sudan and their return would be easy. In fact, they would arrive on the same plane with my mother and siblings.

Although governments in the area did not welcome my father to live in their lands, because his passion to fight the non-Islamic world brought unwelcome attention from strong western leaders, ordinary people all over the Muslim world continued to celebrate my father as a great war hero. While Muslim governments distrusted, even hated him, their citizens loved him. In fact, as soon as the news spread that Osama Bin Laden was setting up new training camps for Muslim warriors, there were many eager recruits, all rushing to join the Jihad. With new recruits following the old, I was a witness to the making of a new army of eager Mujahideen.

Before long, my father would have more men than ever bowing to his ideas, willing to die for his cause. As they arrived in Afghanistan, I met many of those soldiers, because I was ordered to be by my father's side. I discovered that the mature soldiers who had fought with my father against the Russians were for the most part very good men. They had given up their personal dreams in order to free a Muslim country from the grip of a world power. Their purpose had never been to kill innocent civilians. But I noticed that while they seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of former soldier friends, they no longer seemed to have a fire in their belly for fighting.

The younger soldiers were distinctly different, their eagerness to kill and be killed so acute they swaggered with determination through the camps, warriors in the making. But when one looked closer, the quality of their characters appeared questionable. Many seemed to be running away from problems in their home countries. Some had fled to avoid being punished for violent crimes; for example, one of the younger soldiers bragged about slitting his own brother's throat when he discovered that brother having premarital sex. Others had lived in such severe poverty that they had only eaten meat a few times in their lives. Most could not afford to marry. Since Middle Eastern society promotes young marriage and many children, these men felt themselves failures at the achievements their culture held dear. Many were so miserable they felt themselves living in hell on earth, and were easily swayed by the Jihadi message to seek death so that they might soon be boosted into paradise.

I felt sorry for those young men. I knew they believed death to be a great reward, yet I never felt the urge to die; in fact, I did everything I could to stay alive. Though my own life was unhappy, I wanted to live and to pursue God's blessing of life on earth.

One day, while sitting on the edge of the ledge of Tora Bora Mountain and feeling particularly dismayed about my situation, my spirits instantly lifted when my father announced that my mother and siblings were departing Khartoum the following morning. I jumped to my feet, knowing that soon I would see my mother's sweet face. Although cross at the idea of what my mother's daily existence was about to become, I was still excited because I had not seen my dear mother in nearly four months. I wanted to shout with glee across the mountain range but muffled my excitement because my father did not approve of emotional displays.

Ahmad Chalabi by Dexter Filkins

And so here was Chalabi, driving south in a convoy full of guns. After forty-five years in exile, he had come home to a strange land. In the West he was a famous man, and now a notorious one as well. He was a banker and a millionaire and a mathematics professor trained at MIT and the University of Chicago. But in Iraq his roots had withered and died. And so now, in January 2005, Chalabi was reinventing himself as an authentic Iraqi. He was running for a seat in the new Iraqi parliament.

Chalabi had entered his Islamist phase. In his speeches he had begun to speak reverently of Islam and the Prophet. In Baghdad, he had begun forming alliances with Islamist leaders, most notably, most remarkably, with Muqtada himself.

It wasn't terribly convincing. Chalabi did not wear a turban. He had no beard. He did not pray. He did not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician- as an exile come home to a strange land growing stranger by the day- Chalabi had needed to do something. After ten minutes in the shrine, Chalabi emerged. He climbed into his SUV and sped away back to Baghdad. His goal had been accomplished. By morning, all of Najaf would know that Chalabi had come to pay homage under the golden dome of the Shrine of Imam Ali, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Prophet, the holy heart of the Shiite faith.

I pressed him on this bit of opportunism, but he would not give the game away. "It would be bad for me to do that," Chalabi said, cutting me off. "It defeats the purpose." Games-man, exile, idealist, fraud: Chalabi was someone who I never missed the chance to follow around. It wasn't just that he was brilliant, or nimble, or ruthless, or fun. When I looked into his eyes and saw the doors and mirrors opening and closing, I knew that I was seeing not just the essence of the man but of the country to which he'd returned. L'etat c'est lui. Chalabi was Iraq...

I asked Chalabi about the negotiations on the Iraqi constitution. It was the summer of 2005 and the dead line was near. The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were at a standstill. Chalabi was intimately involved in every aspect of the negotiations. He spoke perfect English and perfect Arabic and his energy and intelligence were limitless. Even so, I had to be careful whenever I chose to rely on him. Chalabi always had his own agenda, usually several of them, which he worked on different levels, like a game of three-dimensional chess. Chalabi wanted a unified Iraq, but he was a friend of the Kurds, who wanted autonomy. He was an entirely secular man, but he had pulled close to Muqtada, who wanted an Islamic state. He wore suits and he wore dishdashas. Who was he this time? I felt like any member of the American government must have felt in dealing with Chalabi: was I getting more out of Chalabi than he was getting out of me? Or was I being conned and charmed into submission?

"We are on the brink of an agreement," Chalabi said. "Everything has been settled."

I took out my notebook. This was news. Chalabi's face was blank. What was settled, exactly? I asked.

"Oil", Chalabi said, spooning some ice cream.

"How?"

"It's settled," Chalabi said, face still blank.

We talked details, about which Chalabi was distressingly vague. What's left to be settled? I asked.

Well, said Chalabi, there is no agreement yet on the role of Islam in family issues..."whether to allow clerics on the Supreme Court has not been decided."

I sighed. There wasn't much point in asking Chalabi where he stood on all these issues. I knew him too well for that; he would not have answered.

"It's the same old story", I told him, "You call it progress, you say you are near an agreement, but at each session you maybe solve half your differences. And then the next day you resolve half of what is left. But it never ends."

"Yes", Chalabi said crisply, glancing in Jim's direction. "Zeno's Paradox".

Jim nodded knowingly.

"An infinite converging series", said Chalabi.

"It's called Zeno's Paradox" , Jim said, jumping in, "You add an infinite number of smaller and smaller numbers together and get a finite sum. In other words, an infinite number of meetings and you get to the constitutional agreement in a finite time."

"Yes, exactly",said Chalabi with a smile.

"You'll never get there, I said, trying to pick up the metaphor, whatever it was, "because it's infinite."

"No," Chalabi said, smiling blankly. "That's not right."

Jim laughed. I tried to change the subject.

"Okay, you seem to be backpedaling on women's rights. You say you are secular, but if you let Islamic courts get involved in family disputes, then you are inserting Islam into the state. You are doing the Islamists' bidding."

"Absolutely false", he said

"But how can you square being secular with allowing imams to settle divorces and inheritance?" I asked

"Have you heard the joke about the rabbi and the priest on the airplane/"

How could I refuse? I didn't know the joke.

"A priest and a rabbi are riding on a plane," Chalabi said, leaning back in his chair. "After a while the priest turns to the rabbi and asks, 'Is it still a requirement of your faith that you not eat pork?'

"The rabbi says, 'Yes, that is still one of our beliefs."

"So the priests asks, 'Have you ever tasted pork?'


"To which the rabbi replies, 'Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to the temptation and tasted pork'."

Chalabi was grinning widely.

"The priest nodded and went on with his reading. A while later, the rabbi asked the priest, "Father, is it still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?'

"The priest replied, 'Yes, that is still very much a part of our faith.'

"Then the rabbi asked him, 'Father, have you ever succumbed to the temptations of the flesh?'

"The priest replied, 'Yes, Rabbi, on one occasion I was weak and broke my faith.'

"The rabbi nodded understandingly for a moment and then said, 'A lot better than pork, isn't it?'"

Chalabi beamed at his joke, and Jim and I laughed. After a few more minutes it was time to go. Past curfew. The streets of Mansour were dangerous in the fall of 2005. Kidnappers and insurgents everywhere, even in Baghdad's best neighborhoods. Chalabi uttered something to an attendant, and we said goodbye. As we drove from the compound, a row of Iraqi police cars appeared, their blue lights flashing, getting in line to escort us back across town.

Bataan Death March by Michael & Elizabeth Norman

Several factors contributed to the disaster that struck the U.S. army in the Philippines in 1941, the single largest defeat in American history. Although General MacArthur had at least 80,000 men on the islands at the time, thus outnumbering the Japanese invasion force by two-to-one, only about 8,000 were actually capable of putting up a fight. Many in the American ranks- logistical personnel- had received no more combat training than forced marches in basic training stateside months before. A large proportion of the ranks filled by Filipinos were reservists and militia, poorly equipped with little training. They faced the war-hardened troops of the 14th Japanese Imperial Army, most of whom had no expectation of returning home from the war alive.

Intelligence about Japanese intentions, capacities and preparations was inadequate and useful reports that did get through to the top brass at the Pentagon were brushed aside by a general consensus that their enemies would be a push-over. This problem was compounded by General MacArthur's self-aggrandizing and rosy reports about the progress of his own preparations and expectations about when the Japanese would invade. As it happened, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor the most appropriate action would have been to bomb Japanese air bases on the Island of Formosa. This was not done and, furthermore, most of the the American air force was caught on the ground and wiped-out like sitting ducks leaving Japan with control of the air through-out their five month campaign to capture the island.

Further tactical errors were lack of logistical support for American and Filipino troops when they first confronted the Japanese landing force in Lingayen- gas for their transports and armored vehicles. Most disastrously, after MacArthur decided to take up defensive positions of the Bataan Penisula, he failed to secure sufficient food supplies to sustain resistance though it was available to him. His soldiers were thus, of necessity, placed on half rations as soon as the siege began. Shortages of clean water and medical supplies became apparent at the onset of battle. Thus, not only were the American troops prevented from counter-attacking at a point when Japanese strength was seriously depleted and attacks suspended pending reinforcement from the homeland, the strength and stamina of the Americans and their Filipino allies- their capacity to fight or even to survive captivity were dangerously undermined.

At the time General King surrendered the Japanese were expecting and had started to make preparations for the reception of approximately 40,000 P.O.W's. They got over 70,000, many of whom were already suffering the effects of combat wounds, starvation and various jungle diseases, including dysentery and malaria. But several cultural factors also contributed to the catastrophe which became known as the Bataan death march.

Maurice de Sax, Marshall general of France, believed that "the severe discipline" produced "the greatest deeds," and across the ages, East and West, men pressed into military service often learned the lesson of discipline under duress. The Germans favored the whip, the French the fist. In the Imperial Japanese Army, this "encouragement" (bentatsu, it was called) turned training camps into alembics, a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world. Here the civilian in a man, all he had been or wanted to be, was beaten out of him. What was left were hollow, automatons living in a space, as one recruit put it, where "all breathable air seemed to be exhausted", "a zone of emptiness". Army life was ri ni kanawanai, "unreasonable." That was the word used over and over again, for the injustice was so great, the injury so painful, and the insult so severe, life in camp was beyond all reason.

When the first-year privates finally finished their pitiless apprenticeship, they were promoted to senior privates, stewards to a new cohort of conscripts. Now the bullied became bullies themselves. One group of primitives had created from itself another group of primitives, and all of the groups from all of the camps across all the home islands formed one great primal horde, 2,287,000 men who had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.

Ambiguities in the command structure of the Japanese army compounded the problem. Orders from above- most often lacking specificity regarding actual circumstances in the field- were to be obeyed without questions or reservations. On the other hand field commanders lacked authority to discipline and control their immediate subordinates except in matters pertaining to their willingness to blindly sacrifice themselves and their men in the rigors of combat. In the Philippines, interlopers from the Imperial General staff such as in infamous Masanobu Tsuji, were dispatched to "advise" the commanding General- Fujiko Homma. An agent of Homma's political enemies Tsuji spent his time collaring divisional and regimental commanders and issuing ad hoc suggestions and orders 'to beat the westerners into submission", "mete out the severest punishments with no thought of leniency."

On the other side of the story, according to a U.S. Army report, "the average enlistee" in 1941 "was a youth of less than average education, to whom the security of pay, low as it was, and the routines of Army life appealed more than the competitive struggles of civilian life." They resented their officers, the army's remote upper class, and saw their sergeants as crude overseers promoted more for their mindless forbearance, their time in uniform, rather than their merit. They thought the training rote and stupid, drill for "nitwits": marching in formation, scrubbing barracks floors, shining shoes, standing frequent inspections. Instead of espirit de corps- a "moral force", Ardant du Picq said, that wins battles- the average soldier in the Army of the United States had espirit etroit, narrowing self-interest. "Don't stick your neck out," he would tell his buddies, then reach for another beer. The ethos of "every man for himself" did not work well in the severe trials of captivity and, as it turned out, officers were unwilling and often unable to exercise the authority that would have been necessary to protect the lives of the most vulnerable from the predatory circumstances of the sixty-mile march out of Bataan or interment in a hell hole like Camp O'Donnell.

A Hitchhiker's Adventure in Iran by Jamie Maslin

When we sped past an army barracks, everyone, including myself, yelled drunken abuse at it out of the window. And the lads had good reason to do so as they'll all soon become much better acquainted with the army when they finished their studies and started compulsory military service. The irony is that if Iran is ever invaded then Pedram, Ali, Behzad, and all my other friends will all be called up to defend their country, and if they die they'll be written off in the West as expendable "legitimate military targets", not civilian deaths. With the way Iran is constantly demonized in the media, I fear this may become the case. For just like the American and British lies over Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, much the same is now happening to Iran over its alleged "nuclear ambitions", despite the fact that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found zero evidence that Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has every right to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian purposes, and according to the IAEA, there is no evidence that Iran has ever deviated from this. This organization's head, Dr. ELBaradei, has reiterated this fact repeatedly and stated that his inspectors have for the most part been allowed to "go anywhere and see anything". Pakistan, India and Israel all developed their nuclear arsenals clandestinely and refuse to sign the NPT, but since their governments are buddies with the U.S. and Britain, no one makes such a fuss. Such double standards are not lost on the Iranian people.

What the U.S. and Israel craftily demand of Iran is to somehow prove it is not in any way violating nuclear agreements, which is of course impossible. And since you can't prove a negative the IAEA inspectors are obviously incapable of giving a 100 percent assurance that somehow, somewhere in Iran there isn't the fainest possibility that a nuclear weapons program exists. But this is no more evidence for one existing than to say that because I can't categorically prove Bertrand Russell's famous ironic suggestion that there is a celestial teapot orbiting the earth to be false, then, in fact, there must be one up there doing just that.

Even the CIA itself had admitted that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, by noting that Iran is ten years away from developing nuclear weapons. The importance of this time frame cannot be overstated, for it means Iran has no such program whatsoever, or, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter put it in a recent speech, "Ten years, ladies and gentlemen, in this modern day and age, means Iran is not doing anything! Any nation in the world today is ten years from developing nuclear weapons!" In 2007, much the same was concluded when America's collective intelligence agencies produced an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the current state of Iran's "nuclear intentions and capabilities". This report rubbished claims that Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon and concluded with "high confidence" that as of 2005 Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program and had not restarted it.

Another oft repeated distortion to demonize Iran is that the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has stated that he wants to "wipe Israel off the map." My personal opinion of President Ahmadinejad is that he's an odious little twat, but when translated correctly, his alleged remark, which took place in a controversial speech in 2005, actually says something quite different. According to American professor of modern Middle Eastern history, Juan Cole, as well as other Farsi language analysts, the correct literal translation of the remark is, "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." No reference to "Israel" or to a "map". And a regime is very different to the landmass of a country and its people.

Ahmadinejad had actually been quoting from a speech given by the late Ayatollah Khomeini back in the early 1980s which expressed a hope that one day the Israeli regime mistreating Palestinians would be replaced by a fairer, more equitable one. Also generally unknown is that Ahmadinejad compared the downfall of the regime occupying Jerusalem to the demise of the Shah of Iran. Jonathan Steele makes the following observation in an article for one of Britain's leading newspapers, the Guardian:

"The fact that he compared his desired option- the elimination of the regime occupying Jerusalem" with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. As a schoolboy opponent of the Shah in the 1970s, he surely did not favor Iran's removal from the pages of time. He just wanted the Shah out."

The Missing Link by Colin Tudge

At its core, the story of human evolution is itself an evolving narrative, leading- in fits, starts and many blind alleys- from how we came into existence to who we are today. The details that we do have reveal that all humans are interconnected and related at some root level. But the story is a frustrating work in progress, told in long chapters filled with many blank pages.

Much of the evidence comes from fossils, at best an imperfect means of speaking to us. From a fossil to form, the creature must die in specific conditions. It must be covered soon after death in order to prevent it from being eaten by other creatures or decomposing due to the presence of bacteria. The creature's resting place must remain geologically stable for millions of years. And then it has to be found, properly extracted, and compared to the rest of the record. Only at that point can a new piece be added to the puzzle of our past and, possibly, contribute to what we understand about ourselves.


Sometime in 1982, on a routine day for most of the world, a man living on the outskirts of Frankfurt went on a day expedition to the coal- shale quarry in Messel, hoping to ad to his private fossil collection. While splitting the layers of shale, the fossil hunter stumbled upon a specimen which looked like an exotic monkey crushed to the thickness of a silver dollar- frozen in a fetal position, exactly as she had come to rest on the bottom of the ancient lake whose geological development formed the substance and structure of the pit in Messel.

The man realized he was on to something. He carefully extracted the fossil from the ground and diligently wrapped it in wet newspaper. He then returned to his house and probably employed an expert to prepare the fossil- its preparation was so skillful that just a handful of people in the world could have done it. It must have taken months of careful chipping away the shale and stabilizing the bones before the specimen was ready to be placed on a shelf in his basement with the others that he had excavated, away from the eyes of science and the public, for him alone to see.

In 2006 the anonymous man who discovered the fossil which has since been dubbed 'Ida" put it up for sale at the Hamburg fossil fair (the second largest such fair in the world) where it came to he attention Jorn Hurum, associate professor of paleontology at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, which finally agreed to purchase "Ida" for one million dollars.

Jorn Hurum and his team of scientists concluded from their first comprehensive study of Ida -the most complete fossil primate ever found- that she will have a significant place in the story of human evolution. At her simplest, Ida was a small leaping primate, probably nocturnal and probably vegetarian who lived 47 million years ago in a tropical forest not unlike the ones found in South America today. She died after encountering toxic gas released from the ancient crater lake, a recently broken right wrist and weak left arm had probably brought her to the ground by the shore and prevented her from scurrying to safety. Her remains were fossilized along with the gut contents of her last meal intact.

Remarkably, Ida displays characteristics of wet-nosed and dry-nosed primates, the prosimians and the anthropoids. However, she is a sui generis species. Her eyes are completely stereoscopic. She has a fused cranial plate, indicating increased brain growth. Her lower mandible is fused and her teeth are spatulate. Most important for placing her in the primate evolutionary chain, she doesn't possess a toothcomb or grooming claw, which are innate lemur traits.

Hurum and his team have concluded that Ida documents the moment when early primates were just about to split into two different lineages. Each lineage was successful in its own right, but at the end of the anthropoid lineage is the human, the most successful primate to have walked the earth. In other words, Ida appears to be an in-between species, or one of the long-sought missing links in evolution.; the biggest breakthrough in our understanding of primate evolution in thirty years.