Part 4

Lars Schall: Isn’t he the original role-model for “Dr. Strangelove”?

Graeme MacQueen: He could quite possibly be! (laughs.) There are a number of people who have been claimed, including Henry Kissinger. But Kahn was certainly in some ways a rather horrific figure. Anyway, he wrote a book, “Thinking about the Unthinkable”. And from that point on all kinds of people used the term to refer to nuclear warfare. So I thought, well, that this was interesting – they are now using it to refer to a bioweapons attack. Is there any deep meaning here, is this important? To this day I’m not really sure what the answer is to that, this is a relatively speculative chapter, but I did find a number of things that interested me.

First of all, in 2001 George Bush rejected the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – by that I mean he gave Russia warning that the US was going to unilaterally withdrawal from that extremely important treaty. In the speech he gave on May 1, 2001 –this is months before the anthrax attacks — he said the Cold War is over. So forget about the US and the Soviet Union fighting each other, the Soviet Union was a terrible evil thing, of course, but it’s gone, we don’t have to worry about that anymore, so nuclear weapons aren’t really a major threat for the US anymore, the major threat is terrorism and rogue states possessing weapons of mass destruction. In this context, what he’s really doing is announcing publicly that we’re going to change the global conflict framework – the framework that will divide all of humanity, essentially. It was the Cold War for decades, and now it’s going to be a new one. He didn’t actually call it “the Global War on Terror,” but he was giving us warning that that was going to be. This is a few months before the attacks of the fall – 9/11 hasn’t happened, anthrax hasn’t happened -, but these are the new dangers, he said, and when he described the new dangers, he said that we need to “rethink the unthinkable” – which I thought was an interesting phrase. The unthinkable had been nuclear war before, and now we have to rethink it – so now the unthinkable is terrorism and rogue states with weapons of mass destruction.

Then 9/11 happens, which is supposedly terrorism, and the anthrax attacks happen, which were initially said to be an attack with a weapon of mass destruction by a rogue state, namely Iraq – how interesting. And then we have all these journalists and leaders and everybody talking, oh, the unthinkable is here, the unthinkable has happened! To top it all off, we then have a letter which was sent in September to NBC. It was part of this general thing we call the anthrax attacks, although the powder in it was fake. For reasons I give in my book , I believe it was part of the anthrax attacks. And this letter starts off with the words: “THE UNTHINKABEL”. (3) It was printed in big capital letters and spelled wrong to look like an illiterate radical Muslim extremist had written it. So here we have the anthrax attacks, a letter is being sent to the mass media, saying, the unthinkable has arrived basically, and we have George Bush warning several months earlier, we have to “rethink the unthinkable”, and we have all these journalists and government leaders talking about the unthinkable.

It occurred to me that just maybe, just possibly, this expression “the unthinkable” may be part of the discourse or the rhetoric of this new global conflict framework, that we are being given a message here. We are being told that which could not be thought, that which is so evil that our poor little ordinary democratic western minds can’t grasp it – it used to be nuclear war, but now there is this switch, now the ultimate evil are these dangerous Muslim guys, who are our enemies in “the Global War on Terror”. They don’t have nuclear weapons, but they are going to use the best they have, which is biological and chemical weapons – and so now this is the unthinkable. This our poor little humane kind of rational western minds can’t quite come to grips with this, this is beyond us, so we call it the unthinkable. So we have to throw ourselves into the arms of our governments leaders to protect us from this horrible evil. I think that’s what’s going on. As I said before, there is certain amount of speculation in my interpretation here, but I give the evidence and people can make of it what they will.