The Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here’s the way the headline writer put it:

FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?

After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn’t (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these “monarchic weapons” (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.

The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it contracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry’s article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.

Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world’s global conversation.

In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker.

Categories: Uncategorized dw