It's the kind of summer only a penguin could love, so the plan was to post some of uplifting, sun-kissed songs to dispel the gloom. Instead here's Johnny Cash and possibly the most beautiful cover ever recorded.

Star Wars 2: The Phantom Menace

Reagan's 'Strategic Defence Initiative' (SDI) was derisively dubbed 'Star Wars' back in 1983. If anything it was unfair on Star Wars because Darth Vader actually had a laser and it worked pretty well, while the success of SDI seemed entirely dependent on Soviet missiles colliding in space.

No-one is calling it Star Wars anymore. Today, Condeeleza Rice signed an agreement with Poland to station ten US missile interceptors in Poland by 2012. Subject to ratification from the Polish parliament, the US will have 'boots on the ground' in Poland, and the missile shield will become reality; a reality that will cost the US taxpayer upwards of $4.8 billion over the next five years.

The shield is being built to counter the threat of Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles, says President Bush. Except Iran doesn't have any ICBMs. To develop them it will need a nuclear capacity, a colossal pile of money and, ideally, Wernher von Braun, three things it currently lacks. What Ahmadinejād does have is the Shahab-3 rocket which can get to the shops and back, but looks a long way from being operational, as former UN weapons inspector Geoffrey Forden testifies. We know this because the last time they tested it bits fell off.

'Irrelevant', blusters Missile Defense Agency director, Lieutenant General Obering. "We can't wait until we actually see one of those long-range tests to begin to build the missile defenses," he puffs. Fair enough, but if Iran's weapons program is as advanced as the Bush administration would have us believe, surely it will be able to target Israel long before it can send them anywhere near Poland? And Bush has made it fairly clear that airstrikes will prevent that ever happening (as Pilger argues). So how does the shield reconcile with the doctrine of pre-emption, the one consistent principle driving an administration virtually principle-free?

Thankfully this will soon be Obama or McCain's problem, because with Putin in the Kremlin, the Georgian crisis still unresolved and the restoration of Russian prestige high on the agenda, this is a frightening situation. Bush's move is provocative and breaches the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, unbalancing the long-established principle of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction. Ah! Not so, says Obering:

"We talked about taking transparency measures with the Russians. First of all, we've invited them to our missile defense sites. But more importantly, we said, 'you're concerned about this being aimed at you and not the Iranian threat.' We will build the sites, activate them, test them, and then we will not bring them to an operational status unless the Iranian threat emerges. That was our proposal. We think that's eminently reasonable."

Somehow I don't think the Russians are going to buy that. You don't need to be Jack Ryan to realise that the line Putin's generals will be taking right now is that if the US can build ten interceptors for Poland, it can build 100. Dr. Strangelove would probably call it 'the missile interceptor gap'.

The shield make no sense — strategically, economically or diplomatically — so why then? President Eisenhower answered this question almost 60 years ago in his brilliant final Oval Office address. He warned the nation to guard against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex," which would develop a momentum of its own.

"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

It was a point made in Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight and made forcefully again by George Monbiot in yesterday's Guardian: "Federal Government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions." Missile defence, Monbiot contends, is "the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out."

Someone, somewhere has edged us a little closer to the edge for that extra spoonful.

Pilger on Hiroshima

John Pilger marked the 63rd anniversary of Hiroshima in the Guardian this week with a typically impassioned assault on US foreign policy, then, now and, presumably forevermore. For Pilger, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first names on a rap sheet of US nuclear bullying that takes us up to current attempts to cow Iran; in his words, Hiroshima was ‘a criminal attack on an epic scale’.

Pilger’s description of the aftermath is moving and macabre, echoing the harrowing testimony of John Hersey’s seminal account, Hiroshima, and laying bear the full horror of atomic attack. The fallout was literal, metaphoric and enduring: radiation-related cancer claimed lives for decades to come (cases of leukemia didn't peak in the city until 1951), while in the West dissenting voices were ruthlessly suppressed. Aussie journalist Wilfred Burchett raised questions of motive and morality in the Daily Express and quickly found himself ostracised.


The problem with Pilger's piece is that the logic is twisted and arguments second hand, borrowed mainly from late ‘60s revisionist historians. At the height of Vietnam, liberal American academics began to question not only war in Indochina, but the origins of the Cold War itself. The A-Bombs weren’t the final shots of the Pacific War, but the first of the Cold one, they argued. One, Gar Alperovitz, coined the term ‘atomic diplomacy’, indicting his country for sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to send Stalin a veiled message. In other words, an act of war driven by the considerations of peace.

Although it is true to say that the Soviet Union was a factor — and many would argue the Cold War was well underway by 1945 — this is spurious stuff. Pilger analyses the decisions made in August 1945 through the prism of August 2008 to create a picture of America as a nuclear monster, then and now.

But what is the link with Iran? What connects the Truman and Bush administrations? and where is the attempt to understand the American mindset in the summer of 1945? after all, this was a nation tiring of a Pacific conflict of monstrous barbarity, of bloodstained beaches and warships transformed into tangled hulks by kamikaze attacks. In June, US marines had watched open-mouthed as the citizens of Okinawa threw themselves off the island’s cliffs, preferring death to capitulation. As Pilger and Alperovitz have it, Japan was on the verge of surrender. As far as America was concerned, Japan was a nation for whom surrender had no obvious verge.

Truman did not wear the responsibility of atomic power lightly. He heard about the successful tests at Los Alamos soon after inauguration (only days before Stalin did), requesting of the press, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

Pilger's main evidence comes from an unlikely source: the US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946. “Air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender,” it claimed. Yes, but the US Strategic Bombing Survey, Curtis LeMay et al, had a fairly obvious axe to grind. And unless I’m missing something Pilger seems to be arguing that conventional bombing would have obviated the need for the A-bombs, which is bizarre and counter-intuitive. 97,000 people died in one fire raid on Tokyo alone. 67 cities were bombed. The suffering was immeasurable.

This is not good history and it’s not good journalism. In making these accusations, Pilger has a responsibility to demonstrate exactly what it would have taken to make Japan surrender, with evidence that extends beyond one eyewash report justifying General LeMay’s salary.

Hiroshima was a monumental human catastrophe and released the nuclear genie from its bottle, but to single it out as ‘murder on an epic scale’ in global conflict that cost almost 72 million lives is a terrible charge to lay at Truman's door. Was Roosevelt a war criminal for what happened in Dresden? What about Churchill? With Pilger there's a conspiracy lurking behind every conspiracy, which is particularly depressing because with PR increasingly a weapon of war, we need insightful, accurate journalism more than ever.


postscript
One question continues to be troubling, but wasn't raised by Pilger. The anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing fell on Friday, only 3 days after Hiroshima. with the shockwaves still hitting the Emperor and his advisors, and Japan's communications infrastructure collapsed, how could a surrender have been offered in that time?

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

More to the point, what the hell is a woodchuck? And while we’re on the subject, why would anyone want to sell seashells on the seashore, where they’re available for free? It’s not a viable business strategy. Not that I wouldn’t like to see someone take it to the Dragons Den, so we can watch Theo Paphites’ head explode.

Aside from the earth-shattering revelation that tongue-twisters are a bit contrived, this post was really supposed to be about Dangerous Jobs for Girls (Wed. 10pm), so back to the programme...

Dangerous Jobs is Channel 4's latest masterstroke, and more proof that if television really is the drug of a nation, as the Disposable Heroes once rapped, then C4 is ketamine. 20 minutes and you’re rocking in a corner, mooning unintelligibly about how much you love cheese.

Only part of the TV screen is visible from the corner of my living room, so I may have missed some key points here but from a distance it looked like some thrusting young turk at C4 had come up with the idea of sending three successful professional women to British Columbia to cut down a tree. Why? Because it was there? Because the Daily Express needed paper for its next 12 issues? A local squirrel had rigged the Big Brother voting?

Boringly, it turned out to be an empowerment issue, presumably a reaction to that well-publicised glass ceiling in the logging industry. It's a quite brilliant idea but for two things (1) there are already people who cut down trees — they're called lumberjacks, and (2) if it's about empowerment and all the participants are older than 17, why is it called Dangerous Jobs for Girls? Only Channel 4 can successfully empower and patronise someone at exactly the same time.

The real victims here are the lumberjacks though. this is merely the latest in a series of blows to their saw-wielding, moose-gnawing machismo. First Monty Python portrayed them as a bunch of wildflower-pressing, scone-buttering jessies, now a bunch of white-collared young guns turns up, demanding to borrow their helmets and have a go on the chainsaw. It if wasn’t so silly, it would be rude — after all, these people already have to wear plaid for a living, and risk life and limb on a daily basis, often literally. While we rant about the missing stapler, they risk going home in a box. Several different boxes.

The big question is, can Dangerous Jobs get even sillier? We can only hope. Deborah Meaden defusing unexploded WW2 bombs in Limehouse would be worth watching.

* Stop press: according to this month's Esquire plaid is IN. Lumberjacks are the new media execs.