Nietzsche`s Zarathustra First Commandment: "What falls, that shall one also push!" Monumental and Cosmic Artistic Fiascos

Norma Desmond's pitful last perfomance as Salome

The Dark Mirror - Many commentators have considered the psychology of the prototypical noir character. Certainly/ the influence of psychology as the preeminent method for the explanation of unusual and even aberrant behaviors could not be overlooked by the post-war noir filmmakers. To depict their noir characters, so often haunted by a dark past, by deep psychological scars which lead to obsessive/ neurotic even psychotic behavior, their imagery was often rife with overt Freudian symbols. While most of these protagonists are men, often disturbed veterans of World War II, many women also gazed into film noir's dark mirror.A variant split personality is featured in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950). In the well- known final scene, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim) watches sternly over his former star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), as she enters completely and irrevocably into her world of movie star fantasy while police and reporters watch on. The schizophrenic Norma's descent into her own personal dark past is indicated by her expression, make-up, and costume. Norma is dressed in a 1920s-style gown which flows off her aging body. The contrast with the young Norma, who was a star, has been repeatedly established in previous scenes. Now having killed her faithless young lover, the middle-aged Norma wears the mask of her young self with make-up and clothing from the period of her youth and stardom. It is extreme, almost expressionistic. Her distorted mien exemplifies her dementia in a way that mimics both the rictus of the hopelessly insane and the affectations of silent film performances. Norma's awareness of the throng around her, staring at her, is dimmed like an actor in performance. Since Norma acts out her own fantasy script, she sees the press cameras before her, out of frame, as the reenactment of sound stage she visited earlier in the film. The dynamic of the shot effectively aligns with Norma's "direction" as the line of the stairway behind her and the line of human bodies both trace a trajectory towards her, making Norma the emotional as well as dynamic center of the composition.

In: The Noir Style, (1999) by Alain Silver & James Ursini.

More classic sort of satire is at play in Sunset Boulevard (1950). As class divisions are often crucial in identifying femme fatales, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a wealthy, forgotten silent film star who is surrounded by her possessions. As they sit on a sofa during a private soiree, a small orchestra plays behind them. Surrounding her are objects of the past (her photographs, jewelry, and gown) and one of the present (her lover Joe Gillis, played by William Holden). Her bare shoulder, necklace, bracelets, dark curls, mouth slightly open, even the wire holder on her left index finger—all are caricatures of the classic fatal woman of film noir. Norma reclines, her legs stretched onto Joe's lap and her right arm extended as if encompassing the world around her—a classic femme fatale pose. If her relaxed her posture implies a queenly ease, Joe, on the other hand, uncomfortable in this world. He clutches her arms around his waist as if to protect himself and his expression is downcast. His head is flanked by pictures of a young Norma, fencing legs on his lap perform the same function as does the pillow on the right edge of the frame. At the left, a champagne buck coud wryly connote a captive phallus. Joe also seems very uncomfortable in his "monkey suit" He is very much the fly caught in Norma's web.  

In: The Noir Style, (1999) by Alain Silver & James Ursini.

Susan Alexander's Opening Night at the New Opera House

 You are fired!

Awful Funny - A reinterpretation of the opera house part of Citizen Kane


Tootsie`s Reveal Scene

 
For I am not Emily Kimberly, the daughter of Dwayne and Alma Kimberly. No, I'm not. I'm Edward Kimberly, the recluse brother of my sister Anthea. Edward Kimberly, who has finally vindicated his sister's good name. I am Edward Kimberly. Edward Kimberly. And I'm not mentally ill, but proud, and lucky, and strong enough to be the woman that was the best part of my manhood. The best part  of myself.


O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: What falls, that shall one also push!
Everything of today - it falls, it decays; who would preserve it! But I - I wish also to push it!
Know you the delight which rolls stones into precipitous depths?- Those people of today, see just how they roll into my depths!
A prelude am I to better players, O my brothers! An example! Do according to my example!
And him whom you do not teach to fly, teach I pray you- to fall faster!

Also sprach Zarathustra

The Andromeda Strain - Neuron and junction: Patterns of Thought

There is something faintly suspicious about thinking seriously about Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain; after all, it was a tremendously successful, best-selling thriller, it became a very successful film, and popular genre novels rarely boast artistic pretensions. The plot of The Andromeda Strain

disin­tegrates under the rough hands of literary criticism; its characters are for the most part stereotypes; and it is interminably didactic. In these and other elements the novel certainly is worthy of the scant scholarly attention paid to it.

In fact, it is rather easy to spend a lot of time examining the weaknesses, inadequacies, and flaws of the novel. Why, then, is the novel interesting? Simply because, in a way that few other science fiction novels attempt, The Andromeda Strain  consciously focuses its narrative attention on the dif­ferences between two patterns of problem solving, one of which ignores human uniqueness, and one of which is exclusively reserved for human mental processes.

The Andromeda Strain is a story about the conflict between these two patterns of problem solving, symbolized by the scientific method, described as painstakingly rigorous and unimaginative, and the intuitive, creative method of human insight.

In the course of evaluating the narrative conflict, we discover that the novel concerns itself with some of the key issues underlying the portrayal of artificial intelligence in science fiction that novels such as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, When Harlie Was One, The Cyberiad do not, although these novels have as their protagonists intelligent computers or robots.¹

These novels, and the many others published as science fiction, present us with artificial intelligences which are portrayed as analogous to human intel­ligence, a fact that Stanislaw Lem puts forward judgmentally in “Robots in Science Fiction.”² Essentially, these books bypass the whole question of the nature of an artificial intelligence. Heinlein’s Mike not only thinks human and holds human values, he gives himself human voices and forms.

David Gerrold’s Harlie is self-conscious, neurotic, and intellectual, while Lem’s intelligent robots, the heroes of a series of fables, are,  human. None of these books confront the nature of artificial intelligences, primarily because the generic problems of describing any kind of alien consciousness may preclude human description in prose.

(They may be rendered mathematically, how­ever.)

While The Andromeda Strain is not about robots or intelligent computers, it is concerned with the conceptual differences between the representative thought processes. Insofar as it concerns itself with two different kinds of thought processes, it bears a formal similarity to Samuel R. Delany’s Einstein Intersection, in which reality defined by the physics used by Einstein, who did not believe in indeterminacy (required by quantum mechanics), is contrasted to reality defined by the principle of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. ³ Insofar as the central narrative focus of  The Adromeda Strain s not on an individual but a process, it bears a structural similarity to many other thrillers, police procedural mysteries, and science fiction novels such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which the main thrust is the process of evolution which takes the human race from its present status to its ultimate development as cells of a universal Overmind.

The Andromeda Strain bears structural relationships to these last two novels, not thematic relationships. Thus, it is formally allied to books with dissimilar thematic concerns and is thematically allied to novels which do not focus on the key issues of artificial intelligence.

The Andromeda Strain is about a process and not about people. The very first line of text announces the subject of the novel: “This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis.” (A page before the beginning of the text attempts to give the novel the appearance of an intel­ligence file through the use of stereotypical classified document announce­ments and graphics.

Similar structural techniques occur throughout as attempts to create a sense of reality for the reader.) Besides announcing the focus of the narrative, this statement announces the span of its action—five days. By limiting himself to five days for the working out of an exciting crisis, Crichton commits himself to a fast pace, which is all to the good since pace is the sina qua non of this form of thriller.

That The Andromeda Strain is about a process working through time alerts us to its interest in structured events. When we see that a significant portion of the novel is given over to detailed descriptions of the workings of the Wildfire laboratory, to the theory of crises, and especially to the mechanics of the Life Analysis Protocol, then what else can we assume but that this novel is con­cerned with processes more than with people—especially when the char­acters exist at the convenience of the plot?

The rapid pace of the thriller is perfectly suited to this concern with process because it moves too fast for the reader to focus on human interactions, only on the next event. Furthermore, the point of view remains with the narrator, another stylistic technique which speeds up the pace. At all times there is an audible auctorial presence whose voice is consistent throughout.

This voice can be distinctly recognized whether the object of its attention is the descrip­tion of a town killed by the alien organism, the workings of an electron microscope, or Mark Hall’s desperate last-minute struggle to avoid nuclear destruction.

All these elements of The Andromeda Strain ⁴ a structured plan for studying any organism, an extensive theoretical rationale for all steps of the establishment of the Pro­tocol, the military’s “Wildfire,” and yes, even “Scoop” plans. It is important to understand that the Life Analysis Protocol is not one simple element;

it is the umbrella which covers all, from scientists’ behaviors to the location of detonator substations in the Wildfire lab. It is the weapon that humans develop to combat just the kind of threat that Andromeda is.

“According to the Life Analysis Protocol, there were three main steps in the Wildfire Program: detection, characterization, and control ⁵ In effect, the Life Analysis Protocol works by modeling the world, then preparing for all foreseeable contingencies, much like the dominant technique of the “Mission: Impossible” television series.

As in that show, the essential tensions are gen­erated by our anticipating the breakdown of the behavioral predictions of the protagonists.

The same thing is attempted by the Life Analysis Protocol. Human error is planned for and prepared against—as in the backup jets waiting to attack the exploratory helicopter should the researchers at Piedmont die of the infesta­tion and the pilot not destroy himself.

Unfortunately in The Andromeda Strain ⁶

This particular point is of key concern in automata theory, in recursivity and self-reference theories of mathematics, and it is a jumping-off point for dis­cussions of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the study of the nature of artificial intelligence, making this novel of particular concern to students of science fiction.

Within the purview of The Andromeda Strain

The second weak link is human nature, and the same weakness which undercuts the teleprinter link almost overwhelms this, too. The characters are barely able to support such scrutiny, especially in light of the recent expe­riences of Three Mile Island, in which human factors scientists and engineers found such poor interface between the reactor’s controls and the technicians manning them that the crisis worsened as a result, and human error due to poor control-systems design was a significant factor in the genesis of the crisis.

By examining the nature of the errors made in the execution of Wildfire, we discover the confrontation and conflict between idiosyncratic human nature and formalized systems procedures, which are the underlying focus of The Adromeda Strain.

Ignoring the novel’s internal inconsistencies, there are two basic categories of error, human errors and systems insufficiencies (that is, reality offering more alternatives than the system could be programmed for). Human errors are rational errors. That is, they are

failures of humans to live up to the rigorous demands of the Life Analysis Protocol’s logic. Insofar as they are rational errors, they indicate the separation between ideal and real behavior, between reality and model. The key is that they occur because, in spite of themselves, the scientists are affected by their emotions. For example, stress is responsible for Burton’s forgetting about the anticoagulated rats, thus set­ting back the team’s understanding of how Andromeda kills.

That information is not important to resolving the narrative crisis. It is resolved, as is H. G. Wells’s Martian crisis, by an overlooked factor—in this case the rapidity of bacterial mutation. (Here is an example of a glaring logical flaw. Andromeda is not a bacterium. It is something alien, a point that the book goes to great lengths to document.) Burton’s error is not structurally important. Yet why is so much made of it? A plausible explanation would be that it is  important to the dramatic confrontation between the protocol and human individuality. The probability of this interpretation rests on several factors.

Consider Burton: he just isn’t tidy enough for Wildfire. His clothes are distastefully rumpled and dirty. Even his scientific record is untidy; he is known as an inspired bumbler, a rider of luck.⁷ And luck is a wild card the model can’t accommodate. He simply doesn’t fit into the protocol. His mistake is not unreasonable.

After all, he is under great stress; recently back from Piedmont, he must have been shaken by what he saw. On top of all this, he does not have any idea of what he should be concentrating on. So when he gets a strong response to the first tests he runs, he has no reason not to put aside an apparently less important result.

That is just the kind of mistake anybody would make. It is just the kind of mistake the system part of Wildfire make (and which Stone and Leavitt, the scientists most committed to Wildfire, do not make in their examination of the Scoop probe). Which is why, even though that error isn’t really important to the narrative, so much emphasis is placed on it: this is the first concrete example of humans erring against the rigid, linear Life Analysis Protocol.

This is where all the didactic material fits in. All the talk about the nature of systems—systems for identifying organisms, uncertainty decision analysis, the rationale for Wildfire, and the Protocol itself—define the right way of thinking, the right way to do science.

A corollary of the rigidity of the Life Analysis Protocol, and of all systems, is its fragility, and this fragility is at the root of the second type of error, in which the system fails because it cannot prepare for the varied inputs of reality. Brainless errors like the paper jam on the teletype warning bell cripple it.

The system’s blind spots become increasingly evident, but blind spots are inevitable because alien life may be too alien for us to predict. The crystalline nature of Andromeda can be recognized by human science, but the probability of that being the nature of the first alien life form encountered by man is small. And what possibility is there of anybody’s being able to predict the kind of chemical reaction that destroyed the lab’s seals? No formal research protocol can provide for every contingency. There are limitations to the system’s ability to interact with reality. Every system constructed to organize thought or be­havior is a model, as role models exist for people, for instance. Every religion defines reality, often in spite of gross evidence of its inadequacy: consider the life of Galileo.

In spite of elaborate security precautions and sterilizing procedures, Wildfire is contaminated by humans who subvert its goals. Christian Kirk, a valuable team member, is in the hospital. This leaves Mark Hall as his replacement, and Hall is not considered to be all that valuable. Peter Leavitt, Stone’s peer and deputy, shares his dedication to Wildfire, yet he sabotages it by hiding his epilepsy. No protocol is designed to assure the competence of the scientists performing the experiments. That is a fundamental assumption, and such assumptions can be wrong (as they are in this novel). Humans can identify erroneous assumptions and change them, while programs can not; if only for this reason, the systematic, limited protocols are inferior to the human minds which unsuccessfully follow the Life Analysis Protocol.

Human minds model reality orders of magnitude more subtly than pro­tocols, programs, or systems can. They have the flexibility to modify the models, and we do this as much emotionally and physically as intellectually: “. . . all cybernetic appoximations to this using a to and fro process fail entirely, because that is only a series of challenges. No, you just have to face the fact that the totality of mind and body forms a unit in which the mind is not a finite state system. ⁸ The same human uniqueness which impels Leavitt to hide his epilepsy fuels the intuitive leap which leads him to understand the nature of Andromeda. They are two sides of the same coin.

   Burton the bumbler is a genius; so is Leavitt and so is Stone. Each one is unique, and defies modeling: there is “also a category which cannot be analyzed by contingencies . . . including rare moments of discovery and insight. ... Because these moments are unpredictable, they cannot be planned for in any logical manner. The mathematics are wholly unsatis­factory. ⁹ The auctorial comment is relevant because (if I may steal yet another thought from Bronowski) no system can be imaginative, and what humans are is imaginative—-and flexible. That is why something as self- evident as the inability of a protocol to survive errors is important.

The Andromeda Strain consciously pits human flexibility against the Pro­tocol’s rigidity. Mark Hall, the inadequate second choice, is the one who discovers the two key facts: that Andromeda can only survive within a narrow range of pH; and that Andromeda had mutated.

Hall is the team member least committed to or involved in Wildfire. His job is to treat the survivors—he’s the clinician, and his perspective is the human one. Even more dramatically, he is the Odd Man. More satisfying than this, he makes his fundamental discovery associatively; his “highway diagnosis. ¹⁰ Hall’s insight comes in the form of an analogy generated by reverie. Analogy, reverie: these are not logical processes, they are intuitive and creative.

The solution to the key problems of the novel, then, comes from mental processes denied to the Life Analysis Protocol, creative processes accessible only to humans. Leavitt, too, shares this experience. He grasps the larger nature of Andromeda in a dream. Fortunately for the plot, he forgets it. (The dramatic climax of the novel is Andromeda’s rapidly mutating like a bacterial colony, and examining Leavitt’s insight too carefully could only interfere with the narrative development.) While the Life Analysis Protocol does have its moments—it is able to deduce Andromeda’s crystalline nature, for instance— it is the uniquely human thought processes that resolve the focal questions.

The whole argument of the novel comprises a single hypothesis: that systematized thought as symbolized by the rigid confines of the Life Analysis Protocol can not compete with human creativity. A corollary to this is that only human intelligence is powerful and flexible enough to confront reality successfully, and this is of particular significance in depicting artificial intelligence, a fact that is the thematic skeleton of the book.

For all its flaws, The Andromeda Strain remains a book that addresses the issue of the nature of artificial intelligence. That it does not address the nature of human intelligence with as much insight ought not to be held against it. The thriller is not the proper format for such a focus. The strength of its view of systematized, limited problem solving is the unexpected virtue of the novel, and that virtue gives it a special place in those works of science fiction that concern themselves with intelligent computers and robots.

NOTES

1. Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Berkley, 1968); David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One (New York: Ballantine, 1972); Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, Michael Kandel, trans. (New York: Seabury, 1974).
2. Stanislaw Lem, “Robots in Science Fiction,” in SF: The Other Side of Realism, Thomas D. Clareson, ed. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971), pp. 307-25.
3. See my “Surreal Translations of Samuel R. Deiany,” Science-Fiction Studies, 4 (March 1977), 25-34; see also my chapter on Samuel R. Deiany in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, for further discussion of this particular point.
4. Michael Crichton, The Adromeda Strain New York: Dell, 1969), ch. 5, p. 48. 5. Ibid., ch. 15, p. 156.
6. Jacob Brownowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 80.
7. Crichton, Andromeda Strain, ch. 5, p. 54.
8. Brownowski, Origins, p. 101.
9. Crichton, Andromeda Strain, ch. 20, p. 202.
10. Ibid., ch. 27, p. 271.

In: The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Machines in Science Fiction. Edited by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich (Editor). London (1982), pp. 109-116.

Nuclear Ambitions in Asia: The Paper Tiger Revisited by Christopher Whyte

``The atomic bomb is nothing to be afraid of. China has millions of people. It cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The death of 10 or 20 million people is nothing to be afraid of...``
Chairman Mao







Valiantly, militantly, cross the Yalu River!
To protect peace and defend the motherland
Is precisely to defend our hometowns!
China’s good sons and daughters,
Of one mind and heart, united tightly,
Resist America! Aid Koreans!
Defeat America, which has the heart of a wolf!
PVA battle song:

There is little doubt that the development of nuclear weapons radically altered the conduct of relations in the international system. Nuclear deterrence defined much of the otherwise-ideological Cold War standoff.

However, Mao Zedong often and famously referred to such weapons, and the great powers that wielded them, as nothing more than “paper tigers” – visibly fearsome but, in reality, a weak military asset and a bluff.

Even despite Chinese development of the bomb in 1964, Mao’s underlying strategic doctrine on waging revolutionary warfare consistently rejected the idea that nuclear forces would be of any significance in future conflicts. That belief is still evident in People’s Republic of China (PRC) military practices today and has significant security implications for the East Asian and Pacific regions. With growing concern amongst China’s neighbors about the growth of PRC military power, it has been suggested that nearby states like South Korea and Japan may inevitably be forced to “go nuclear” as they struggle to construct the appropriate deterrent capabilities to affect a stable, strategic balance of power.

This kind of action could certainly lead to the intense clash of existing doctrines that such deterrent forces would aim to avoid, as disparate security calculations and different capabilities’ assessments lead states to misunderstand intentions, operate from misleading positions of strength and unintentionally fuel a continued rise in regional tensions.

In other words, any state seeking to balance against a rising China should exercise restraint when it comes to the development of nuclear weapons as such a move would do nothing to deter encroachment.

Disdain of nuclear weapons is evident in Chinese military and political thinking from the earliest days of Communist rule. In 1947, Mao wrote that “the atom bomb is a paper tiger that U.S. reactionaries use to scare people…the outcome of a war is decided by people, not by one or two new types of weapons.”

At the outbreak of the Korean War, the PRC chief of staff Nie Rongzhen famously declared that “after all, China lives on the farms. What can atom bombs do there?” The idea that the institution of the people could win conflicts regardless of imbalances in military capabilities became a primary aspect of Mao’s “People’s War” war-fighting doctrine.

This methodology for conducting conflicts was partly geo-strategic and partly ideological, combining the conventional capabilities of a state with the asymmetrical methods and tactics of non-state revolutionary forces. On the one hand, use of propaganda and directed education impassioned domestic hearts and minds, making the defeat of Maoist forces impractical with conventional tactics and weapons.

Conversely, large-scale weapons of war, including air power and the bomb, would be of limited effect in a war against China. This was demonstrated time and again during the Korean War, as poorly equipped Chinese light infantry nevertheless often managed to effectively press UN forces through the use of rugged terrain, great numbers and night attacks.

The strategic mindset of the People’s War continue to shape China’s military strategy throughout the propaganda-rich years of the Cultural Revolution to the present day, with highest emphasis consistently put on popular involvement in the state apparatus and the military maintenance of massive ground forces.

In short, Chinese military strategy has, since Mao, tended to develop and deploy forces that are numerous and difficult to counter with conventional Western tactics.

China’s lack of emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons in warfare continues to this day, even though the current state of its nuclear arsenal is unclear.

Ambiguity in the matter largely stems from the secretive way with which the Communist government treats its armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The number of actual weapons maintained by the PRC is unknown and varied estimates have at times put the arsenal anywhere between 80 and 2000 devices.

However, recent approximations by the U.S. Department of State and non-state institutions like the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) quote a tidier ballpark of between 160 and 250 warheads, while a 2004 white paper on international nuclear reduction saw China call itself nuclear-weapons state that “possesses the smallest nuclear arsenal.”

This implies a number below the United Kingdom’s 200 strategic nuclear deterrent. China is also the only nuclear-weapons state to provide a blanket security assurance that promises not to use its arsenal on non-nuclear belligerents or in nuclear-weapons-free zones under any circumstances.

These circumstances, combined with a long history of limited reliance on such weapons, imply that any future conflict with the PRC would not take the form of nuclear warfare. The current dynamics of China’s military expansion are only further proof of this, with new technology and military hardware aimed at fighting a conventional war with a technologically advanced opponent.

Indeed, China’s own 2004 white paper laid out strategic production and deployment plans (vaguely) to ready the country for conflict with highly advanced adversaries by mid-century. This strategic direction correlates with an overall minimization of the nuclear force to purely deterrent levels, as the use of general atomic force in a conflict with such a described opponent would do little to prevent the use of large, stealthy, sophisticated military forces.

China’s practical strategic doctrine, suggested and labeled in the West in successive Pentagon reports as the “island chain” doctrine, likely emphasizes securing regional hegemony by attaining preponderant operational power in both its own littoral (the first island chain) and the Western Pacific Ocean out to at least Japan and New Guinea (the second island chain). The dynamics of any potential future Chinese hegemony, whether internationally cooperative or aggressively militant, are the subject of constant debate in security communities around the world. However, the lack of focus on nuclear issues and the rise of a large conventional military-industrial production regime in China must be take into account.

Recent developments in the military forces of the People’s Liberation Army have included advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles that are designed to accurately deliver conventional payloads to distant targets. While some types of these missiles can be deployed with nuclear warheads, it is widely suggested that they are primarily aimed at neutralizing localized military assets in an invasion of Taiwan.

This could include their use against American and other foreign naval units that have the ability to intercede in regional conflict, especially aircraft carriers and their associated battle groups. Further developments in PLA capabilities have stressed the modernization and production of advanced fighter-bomber and blue-water naval forces to help achieve regional security objectives.

Large submarine forces are already widely used by the PLA Navy to protect shipping interests and project power throughout the local region, while the ongoing construction of aircraft-carrying ships has been a source of constant discussion amongst members of Western defense establishments for several years.

To meet its own goal of capably meeting technologically-advanced threats by mid-century, China will assuredly have to continue expanding its conventional military force structure to reflect its strategic needs.

Heavy investment in R&D that facilitates the production of new technologies will be an ongoing trend for the PLA.

However, there are no signs that China’s nuclear forces play anything but a deterrent role in future security calculations and, as mentioned above, various signs that China dismisses their effectiveness.

The final result of the growth of the PRC’s military capacity is, perhaps, that China’s nuclear perspective will be exported abroad. After all, the extensive capabilities of any advanced military opponent reduce the tactical effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the field as those forces grow, diversify and become increasingly difficult to target with strategic warheads.

Countries in the region that are concerned for their security should realize this truth and take steps to avoid a nuclear escalation that would do little to deter the doctrinally-different military culture of the People’s Republic of China.

http://www.e-ir.info/2011/05/28/nuclear-ambitions-in-asia-the-paper-tiger-revisited/

Russia Federation: “Should Anything Happen to Iran … This Will Be a Direct Threat to Our National Security”

Christopher Whyte is a graduate student in Political Science in International Relations at George Mason University, Virginia. He writes independently as a defense analyst in the Washington D.C. area.