WHAT YOU CAN DO AGAINST NUCLEAR TERRORISM

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and the so-called "safeguards" introduced in 1977 as a strange complement to it (the two are actually legally incompatible) provides a little window dressing, but does nothing to stop proliferation even in the countries that signed the NPT. The basic raw material for all presently feasible small bombs, uranium, is not even kept track of; the inspections of power fuel are made after ample prior warning to the inspected country, rely practically only on the inspected country's records, are entirely formal, and can easily be evaded; and the IAEA has no authority to stop proliferation even if its legalistic charades were able to uncover it.

Nuclear proliferation, let me point out once again, is a political, not a technical problem; what has changed since 1981 is that the West has grown even more cowardly, and the Israelis themselves are beginning to go soft. The French pledged to rebuild the Osirak immediately after the Israeli raid and have done so. The Iraqis announced, on the day after their agents were arrested, that they have nerve gas, rockets to deliver it, and the intention of using it on Israel. The West, and its alleged US leader, did not even yawn: for when the Iraqis used poison gas on their own Kurdish civilians and in the war against Iran (in which long-range rocket capability was also displayed), the West had yawned already.

For the US, it is business as usual with the openly terrorist governments of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. America, let alone the rest of the West, has become a paper tiger that mumbles and weakly wags its finger when its military officers are hanged by illiterate thugs in the Middle East or when its passenger jets are blown out of the sky. (It took a pound or two of Semtex plastic explosive to cause the disaster at Lockerbie; Havel announced last month that the Czech factory previously making it had shipped 1,000 tons of it to Libya alone.) Limp Wimp Bush had his emis-saries drink champaign with the butchers of Tienanamin Square and has in effect been encouraging the use of force in Lithuania by warning the Soviets not to use force every time they have been using it.

So not much threatens the terrorists from the Free World. If the US government is trembling lest the Israelis take out Osirak a second time, let alone do it themselves, there are few choices left. The first thing is to realize fully that the US government will tax you to finance the exhibition of "Pisschrist" and the maintenance of a poverty industry, but not to protect you from terrorism. You can then become an activist to promote SDI (which will protect the US from Third World "rogue" missiles even when the USSR is in tem-porary disarray) and to push for a more determined foreign policy than Monaco's. Or you can go it alone and protect your family from nuclear attack by personal survival. See addresses below.

[SDI: High Frontier, 2800 Shirlington Rd./#405-6, Arlington, VA 22206. Personal survival: Fighting Chance, Box 1279, Cave Junction, OR 97523 American Civil Defense Assn., Box 910, Starke, FL 32091; survival computer BBS at 301-821-2815.]