Our Misbegotten War on Terror Should Have Been Aimed at Our Own Stupidity — for Example, the Vanished American Supply of Lithium 7 — and Its Relationship to Maintaining Nuclear Safety on American Soil

© 2013 Peter Free

 

11 October 2013

 

 

It is more fun to blame other people for dangerous shortcomings in oneself

 

Take the following example of American national security stupidity, which exactly parallels our brainlessness in shutting down domestic rare earth elements production decades ago:

 

 

Most nuclear reactors in the United States rely [indirectly for cooling] on a type of lithium that is produced only by China and Russia, and the supply may be drying up . . . .

 

The Government Accountability Office said the looming shortage of a material critical to the operation of 65 out of 100 American nuclear reactors “places their ability to continue to provide electricity at some risk,” a conclusion echoed by outside experts.

 

The problem reflects the withering away of the American industrial infrastructure of all things nuclear, and the nation’s dependence on distant places for “energy-critical materials,” including “rare earth” materials used in high-efficiency motors, and other materials used in solar cells.

 

Producing these generally involves environmentally damaging processes, one reason that production has moved abroad.

 

The material in potentially short supply is specifically lithium-7, which is what is left over when it is separated from another form, lithium-6, which can be used to make tritium, the hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb.

 

The United States shut down almost all of its machinery in 1963, when it had a huge surplus, now mostly consumed. It has not had to make much tritium in the last few years because its nuclear weapons inventory is shrinking.

 

© 2013 Matthew L. Wald, Report Says a Shortage of Nuclear Ingredient Looms, New York Times (08 September 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

Psychological misdirection

 

Y’all know fur sure that we gotta worry more about furin terrorists — rather than about one of our own nuclear plants melting down — ‘cause we were too dumb to keep it safe.

 

 

The moral? — National security begins with domestic infrastructure and supply chains

 

Overlooking what is necessary here, so as to go abroad and chase after poorly dressed men carrying Kalashnikovs, misses the principal point of national security — which is to stay strong and competent at home.

 

If we look around, we see crumbling infrastructure everywhere we look.  You can imagine the lapses that we don’t see.

 

Guess which threat is actually larger.  By orders of mathematical magnitude.

 

As is usually the case, our biggest national security enemy is our aversion to looking clearly at ourselves. It was not Islamic extremists who forced us to cut necessary rare element supply chains. Nor is it Islamist terrorists who are presiding over America’s domestic rot.

 

We pay people “lotsa dough” to be on the lookout for national security problems.  But, like small male children, they are constantly looking at action figures abroad, rather than at the uninteresting guts that make American run every day.

 

To make a crassly on point metaphor — with apologies to my female readers — our prevailing national security priorities are like being infatuated with one’s erection, without recognizing that it is the combination of a pumping heart (economy) and vasculature (infrastructure) that keeps it suited to one of its purposes.

 

Paying a lot more attention to what is actually important on the security front would avert trouble down the road.  We need to give the testosterone-poisoned male children in power the boot and hire some sound-of-mind women instead.