The New Arms Race - 11 December, 2002 - News

Astonishing coincidences do happen; one of them occurred today
A ship carrying 12 Scud-type missiles on board was intercepted by two Spanish ships in the Arabian Sea today. However, the story is rather strange. To begin with, Americans made some haste to declare that they had been monitoring the ship since the moment when it left a port, which is allegedly said to be a Korean port (it is not specified which port exactly). It is believed that the ship was heading for Yemen. Later, it was reported that the American authorities had no evidence to prove that North Korea supplied Yemen with missiles, but it was mentioned that the possibility could be highly likely.

It is not clear why Spanish ships were involved in the capture of the vessel in the Arabian Sea if the US special services knew themselves what was on board. Are there no American ships in the Arabian Sea? Or did Washington decide to let its allies to carry out the operation to avoid unnecessary attacks of sceptics? To tell the truth, American special services, which always discover everything suspicious and criminal, don’t enjoy much confidence in the world.

Almost at the same time, reports about a new American national strategy for combating weapons of mass destruction appeared in the press. And although only six pages of the new document containing general provisions were officially published, Washington Post journalists managed to obtain a top-secret “Presidential directive on national security” under the number 17, which describes the new strategy. Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports that the secret part of the strategy says that the USA will follow a doctrine of preventive strikes in order to fight against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their transportation. At that, the USA plans to prevent deliveries of components of weapons of mass destruction before they can be assembled. The top-secret part of the document also says that the new approach adopted by the firstly (and what countries follow?).

Certainly, this document is extremely secret, but it caused no great sensation. This is probably for a very obvious reason: the world community has already reconciled to the idea that the USA is free to do whatever it desires. And, most likely, it’s still beyond people’s understanding that the US Administration thinks that it is free to intervene into affairs of other countries if it thinks that these affairs pose any danger to America’s interests. And the very notion of “interests” is a loose concept, as we know.

On the whole, the whole incident was a success for the USA. The leakage of secret information about the US’s new concept of its struggle against weapons of mass destruction just happened to coincide with the capture of the ship delivering Scud-type missiles, a possible means for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction. On the whole, the White House doesn’t even need to make excuses, as “components” of weapons of mass destruction are widely spread indeed. It seems will just entail another arms race. Under these conditions, those countries that are already on the US black list and even those that are not will strenuously work on the creation nuclear weapons. And they will successfully develop these weapons in complete secrecy. Even all the efforts of such a superpower as the USA will not be enough to stop all of these countries.

Vasily Bubnov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/world/8455-usa/

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