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Various Ways Extinction Could Occur

Comment by Larry Ross September 29, 2005

Mankind has created a number of ways which could be used to trigger an extinction process, as assessed by this article by editors of the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in Dec 2004.

Some factors not assessed, even more relevant today are:

1. The possibility of an unbalanced, rogue and/or ideologically-driven government gaining power and deliberately implementing a strategy of war and terror attacks which then escalate into a
   self-extinction process. Some suspect this may already be happening.
   
   Bear in mind that many governments today have huge resources at their command, which if employed for evil purposes (portrayed as good, god-directed and a necessary response to terrorism in order to get public support) may trigger a series of destructive events leading to the useage of all types of WMD agents and weapons.
   
   
2. Bulletin editors did not take into account the growth and evolution of various technologies and sciences that could result in new types of mass destruction weapons. In this respect one should consider the very rapid growth of new technologies, and the huge budgets that governments spend on their destructive technologies.The most destructive developments may not yet be known - as most governments like to keep many details of their defences secret, so that potential enemies are not alerted.
   Given the disproportionatley large amounts spent on research and development of weapons, it is reasonable to expect a quicker rate of discovery and application of the results, than with civilian technologies.
   
   
3. Social breakdown and conditioning. If a government is determined to initiate wars, it must condition it's population with a series of lies, fraudulent claims and other devices.
   Hitler conditioning his population for world war II is an excellent example. Mussolini with the Italian population is another.
   
   A contemporary example is in the case of the Iraq war.The Bush Administration first used the false claims that Sadam had nuclear or other WMD, planned to attack the US and UK, sponsored terrorism, had links with Osama Bin Laden and with the 9/11 attack. All these claims were false, but highly effective in mobilising public and Congressional support for Bush's pre-planned war on Iraq. The accepted lies opened the US Treasury to whatever resources Bush needed for this criminal enterprise. Even when exposed as lies, many people preferred to still believe them. Bush still repeats them, he was re-elected and the Treasury remains open to him.
   
   When the lies were exposed and refuted with masssive amounts of evidence, it did not seem to have any effect. The media still repeated the lies and people still believed them. Large protests initially, dwindled to little or nothing. The lies were changed and the reasons for the war became 'introducing freedom and democracy to the persecuted Iraqis and getting rid of the Sadam dictatorship' People believed the new lies as well, or just denied the awful truths and continued 'business as usual' as most Germain jews did before Hitler introduced his final solution.
   
   Hitler taught: "The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it"
   
   Unfortunately the Iraq war seems to prove this to be true, even in America, which likes to believe it's much ballyhooed 'freedom and democracy' is the antithesis of the Hitler dictatorship. In spite of the exposure, the killing, imprisoning and torturing of Iraqis continued. Congress and the people accepted this lie and any other lies the Bush administration cared to invent to justify these first steps of its overall strategy.
   
   
4. Not taken into account is that an alleged terrorist attack on the US may result in a series of destructive reactions. These may trigger other reactions from those attacked , which may trigger further reactions and so on until the extinction process is unstoppable.
   
   
5. Lord Louis Mountbatten, once Chief of Staff of the UK military became an opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. He said "nuclear weapons have no military purpose" and "during wartime, expect the unexpected". How very true.
   When considering the use of various doomsday weapons we cannot predict the results and consequential reactions from unexpected sources. In other words "expect the unexpected".Other countries may enter, and an escalation process may commence and become unstoppable.
   
   
6. War strategies may change and previously rejected "extremist" war strategies, become resurrected by a new extremist administration bent on war. For example Bush's revised nuclear weapons-use strategies and pre-emptive nuclear war strategies are extreme and provocative. They can certailnly result in a doomsday as written elsewhere in this site.

Although the following article may seem to border on the frivoless, it is a good study, which contains excellent scientifc data and references.

Larry Ross

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Rethinking Doomsday

Loose nukes, nanobots, smallpox, oh my! In this age of endless imagining,
and some very real risks, which terrorist threats should be taken most seriously?

By Linda Rothstein, Catherine Auer and Jonas Siegel
November/December 2004 pp. 36-41, 44-47, 73 © 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

This year, beginning with the January/February 2004 issue, the Bulletin began a series of articles we dubbed "Rethinking Doomsday." The effort was in direct response to the remarkable proliferation of potential death-and-destruction scenarios about which so much has been made since 9/11.

There is no doubt that the attacks of September 11, 2001 made clear that Americans faced very real dangers at home that few had foreseen and even fewer had taken seriously. Three years later, many, if not most, of us remain frightened.

But so many doomsday scenarios have been paraded on TV, in the newspapers, and in the course of political campaigns, that we can't help asking: How many possible terrorist attacks with how many possible weapons can there be? Must we, while worrying about nuclear holocaust or about terrorists commandeering airplanes or detonating conventional explosives, also worry that tomorrow we will come in contact with an evildoer bearing live smallpox stolen from somewhere in Siberia, with which he intends to infect the entire unsuspecting United States? (Government officials blithely assure us that we are all safer than we were before 9/11, but also say a smallpox epidemic is a case of "not if, but when.") How much time should we have devoted to the idea that the United States faced a gathering threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons? About a plot to poison the food supply? Or should we worry if foreign visitors are seen taking snapshots of the Flatiron Building?

.....continue....