IS JOHNNY WALKER WHISKEY BOOTLEGGED?

Anti-Business Week has in the past advocated protectionism, and now supports or opposes decontrol as the latest fashion dictates. It brought you Anthony Parisi's description of Commoner's Marxist sermons as "heady stuff;" it competed with the National Enquirer in scare-mongering over the Browns Ferry fire; it mostly reviews leftist books, and smears, but more often ignores, free-market books. (The issue of 15 August sympathetically reviews the memoirs of IPS-boy Cyrus Neville Vance, who resigned as Secretary of State because even Carters policy of appeasement was not Chamberlainesque enough.)

Here comes another episode for its annals. Its issue of August 8 brings a piece called "A Soviet Nod to Nuclear Safeguards" by some innocent lady named Barbara Starr: "A tiny ray of hope has developed on the sensitive question of on-site inspection, an old impediment to effective arms-control verification."

On site? In Moscow? In Vladivostok?

No, in Portsmouth, Ohio: The US is placing a (civilian) uranium enrichment plant under international safeguards and inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But hold on, here comes the terrific news: "The Soviets for the first time," jubilates Barbara, "have made a limited offer to allow IABA inspection of Soviet nuclear power station and research reactors.

"Indeed, they have. To impress innocents like Barbara; and to give the bureaucratic buffoons of the State Department an opportunity to express the hope (what else do these fossils ever do but express hope?) that these developments "may", "eventually," lead to a "breakthrough."

International inspections and safeguards are a farce to which we will return some other time, but one of the more farcical jokes of this farce is played by the weapons states (including the US), who freely admit that they have all the bomb-building facilities in the world, but offer their power plants for international inspection as a gesture to encourage the non-weapons states to follow suit.

Imagine the makers of Johnny Walker whiskey offering their boardrooms for international inspection to make sure they don't have any illicit stills under the conference table!

Could there be anything more farcical in this farce? Yes: Johnny Walker agreeing to inspection of only some of their conference tables. That is what the USSR is doing when it offers only some of its power and research reactors for inspection. More farcical still, the US offers an enrichment plant, not just its power reactors, for inspection. Unlike the latter, enrichment plants could indeed be used for producing weapons-grade uranium, were it not for one insurmountable obstacle: the US Congress, which will not allow civilian and military applications to be mixed.

Its control over Soviet enrichment plants appears to be somewhat less effective.