Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
To this shrinking chessboard, Bracken adds the destabilizing factor of “disruptive tech-
nologies”: technologies that, rather than help sustain leadership and the current global
power structure, “undermine it by disrupting the status quo.” Such technologies include
computer viruses and weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear and biological
bombs. Bracken writes:
Disruptive technology changes the game. By upsetting existing advantages, it
nurtures new skills and fosters different strategies. The resulting uncertainty
shakes up the established order and changes the standards by which leadership is
measured.
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Indeed, disruptive technology, abetted by religious zealotry, brought the Iranian plateau
to the doorstep of geographical Palestine, even though Iran and Israel are separated by over
eight hundred miles. And Iran is merely part of a trend. As I've indicated, rather than shop
only for the latest in Western armaments, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and other
countries are developing disruptive technologies. In an age of former Third World coun-
tries acquiring tactical nuclear weapons, large forward bases like the kind the U.S. mil-
itary maintained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait prior to the two Gulf wars may henceforth
be vulnerable to enemy attack. Such a development promises to hinder America's projec-
tion of power around the Eurasian rimland, and thus pave the way toward a more unstable,
multipolar power arrangement. It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key
locations around the world that has preserved American military might. But nuclear and
chemical-biological weapons can destroy these forward sites, or at least render them un-
usable for a time. “Preservation of the asymmetric situation,” Bracken writes, “whereby
the greatest military power in Asia is not Asian [but American] depends on arms con-
trol”—something which is becoming increasingly problematic as former Third World na-
tions develop disruptive military capabilities. For decades the United States and the Soviet
Union used nuclear weapons without actually detonating them for “political maneuvers,
implicit threats, deterrence, signaling, drawing lines in the sand, and other forms of psy-
chological advantage.” Now more countries will want to do likewise, even as some will be
motivated by a rage that is the upshot of poverty, even as they will lack the bureaucratic
control mechanisms to responsibly control the use of these weapons. During the Cold War,
both superpowers approached nuclear warfare with “detachment and rationality.” That may
not be the case in what Bracken calls “the second nuclear age,” in which Eurasia consti-
tutes a small room crowded with poor countries, some of which are nuclear powers.
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“The spread of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in Asia is like the spread of the
six-shooter in the American Old West,” says Bracken. Cheap and deadly, the six-shooter
was an equalizer because it rendered the size and physical strength of a man much less im-
portant. Just as the six-shooter changed the balance of power among men in the Old West,
