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Why per capita poverty does not factor into China's global power equation


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

Monday, September 18, 2006

My inquiry in Yahoo! “China’s military power” evoked 3,670,000 “search results.” Who are these 3,670,000 experts?

Soon after I came to the United States in 1972, I posted in the New York Times an ad soliciting a typist, and a lady who responded asked me what I wrote. I thought that she wanted to know the scope of her work and explained that I was from Soviet Russia and wrote about the Soviet dictators’ development of superweapons. Suddenly she exclaimed grievously: “I should have been writing and publishing all this! Not you! I have a Ph.D.!”

“My dear lady,” I quipped. “We cannot swap our destinies because I cannot type, much as I envy you.”

Those 3,670,000 comments on China’s military power may fail to contain a single valuable sentence, but be made public because their authors have Ph.D.s and other such titles issued to them by universities and other bureaucracies.

I will take one sample out of these 3,670,000 comments, the Boston Globe article “Assessing China’s Power,” by Joseph S. Nye Jr., who has had so many academic degrees and held so many government posts that he has been voted one of the ten most influential scholars in international relations. He postulated that a poor country like China cannot be a threat to a rich country like the United States. We learn that in China the “income per capita is only $1700 or 1/25 of that of the United States.” Indeed, in China “400 million live on less than $2 per day.”

But is wealth so crucial for military victory?

How were nuclear weapons (decisive from 1945 to 1949) developed in the United States?

In his letter of Aug. 2, 1939, to Roosevelt, Einstein cites the research of Fermi and Szilard in America and Joliot in France, to show that the atomic bomb was possible.

Fermi, Szilard, and Joliot, as well as Einstein himself, were scientists of genius, and genius is the core of development of a superweapon. Fermi was not a Jew, but his wife was Jewish, and after Mussolini launched anti-Seminitism to please his ally Hitler, the Fermis emigrated to the United States. As did Szilard and Einstein. Neither Joliot nor his wife IrËne was Jewish, and as the Nazi invasion came he sent the documents of their research to England and stayed in France to participate in the Resistance.

Most of Manhattan Project scientists of genius were Jewish emigres. They were afraid that Hitler would conquer the world, and in 1942, it became clear to them that he could well annihilate them. Money was not why they emigrated and worked for the Project. Nevertheless, the Manhattan Project cost over 20 billion in today’s U.S. dollars. Why?

Even if the U.S. government paid every Manhattan Project scientist of genius 1 million a year in today’s U.S. dollars for three years (1942-1945), the total sum would have been a fraction of 1 billion in today’s U.S. dollars, while, actually, the cost of the Manhattan Project in today’s U.S. dollars exceeded 20 billion. Where did the money go?

Many labs and other sites of the Manhattan Project were built. I asked a crane-operator on a construction site near our apartment house how he was paid: “$75 an hour,” he said. The minimum pay per hour is now over $5, but the mass demand is for $7. Of course! If a crane operator makes $75 an hour, no wonder housing is so expensive that the lowest-paid employee cannot afford for his $5 an hour or $800 a month a living minimum for his family despite all social benefits.

Nye (“University Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University”) says that in China “400 million live on less than $2 per day.” Well, that means that the Manhattan Project would cost in China not 20 billion today’s U.S. dollars, but less than 1 billion.

Curiously, the total cost of WWII for the United States was 3.3 trillion dollars. That is, the U.S. development of nuclear weapons cost a fraction of 1 percent of the U.S. total cost of WWII.

Yet if the atomic bomb had been developed by the United States before Hitler launched a conventional war in 1939, there would have been no war, none of $3.3 trillion would have to be spent, and Germany would have surrendered unconditionally, as did Japan in 1945.

Inversely, if Hitler had developed nuclear weapons before the rest of the world did, the world would have been his without any conventional war, and the 3.3 trillion spent by the United States on conventional weapons would have been irrelevant.

There is no annihilation of Jews in the West today, and Jewish scientists of genius do not escape to China. But China’s global espionage/intelligence service is well able to conduct with the aid of China’s scientists, a global search for genius in the fields of development of superweapons. Today, a Western scientist working in China is by no means that odious figure he was in Soviet Russia. What China’s dictatorship needs is to select, in today’s mass exchange and association of scientists between China and the West, individuals of genius—the Einsteins, Fermis, Szilards, Joliots of new fields of development of post-nuclear superweapons—and create for them the living and working conditions they would find more attractive than anywhere else.

I and several American scientists spoke about a year ago in a “Voice of America” radio program for Russia. They all considered China an ideally peaceful society, doing a minimum for its defense against the United States, having invaded, with its allies, Iraq and Afghanistan. One of these scientists said that Beijing is more architecturally beautiful than New York, and different apartment houses are designed by different outstanding foreign architects. Want to live in a beautiful French apartment house? Here you are!

The attraction of the world’s best scientists for living in China and working in the new fields of development of superweapons takes little money, but a lot of brains. And the minimum wage of $5 or 7 an hour, unionized crane-operators, making $75 an hour, as well as millionaires, billionaires, and other signs of American wealth will not help, as no money or property helped Japan in 1945.

A superweapon, called by the Chinese dictators an “assassin’s mace weapon” (such as the nuclear bomb in 1945) is the cheapest way of “winning war without fighting,” to quote Sun Tzu, the venerable Chinese teacher of strategy. It can be said that the “assassin’s mace” is a poor country’s winning-without-fighting weapon, while the Pentagon spent in 1942 to 1945 $64 billion on tanks and $69 billion on artillery, conventional bombs, mines, and grenades, and is now doing the same—evidently for a museum, if such is to exist in the Chinese colony, once called the United States.

It can be said in conclusion that the term “poverty” is not universal. A unionized crane-operator lives on our street in a mansion, complete with a wine cellar, and a box at the Met to which he (in tuxedo) and his wife (in furs) go in their luxurious sedan, while the U.S. government is in ever deeper debt. In China 400 million live on less than $2 a day, while the dictator has enough dollars at his disposal to buy the controlling shares of all stocks registered by Dow Jones. The dictator can thus be the U.S. super-capitalist even in terms of U.S. dollars, to say nothing of the rest of his property: China and the Chinese. No wonder he wants to own the rest of the world as well. First, this will make his ownership of China more secure. And second, you must agree that to own the world is more satisfying than to own a pathetically few billions of dollars.

As for 400 million living in China on less than $2 a day, the Chinese will become the master race as a result of China’s world domination, and will prosper at the expense of the subjugated nations.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

Monday, September 18, 2006

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