Thank God for Joe Jacob, the man who finally revealed that we haven't got a real plan to cope with Sellafield going boom. Nor have we for dealing with a direct hit by a 30 megaton nuclear missile on Dublin. Nor for a comet strike or the tectonic plates shifting beneath us and swallowing our island whole. And if a 100-foot tidal wave were to hit us, there would be little opposition from the Department of the Environment, though a stout rearguard action might be expected on the upper slopes of the Sugarloaf by Mildred Pennefeather, who so distinguished herself with her mop the night of Hurricane Charlie.
Iodine tablets
You are allowed a wry smile when you hear of the iodine tablets which have been stockpiled against the day when they will be needed. The day that they are needed is a day or two too late. It is an umbrella being issued to a man as he is swept away in the cataclysm after a river has burst its banks; it is the parachute to the broken corpse, the fire extinguisher to the human cinders.
That's why we should all show such sympathy to poor Joe Jacob, a man of such overpowering integrity that he is unable to convincingly tell the lie that this country has a workable plan to cope with nuclear disaster. It clearly hasn't, even though we are told that the Government has just spent 12 months preparing one.
Let's go into the history of this thing a little bit. The first nuclear bombs went off in 1945. Russia got its atomic weapons working in 1951. Britain did the same a few years later, and gradually the technology of making such bombs spread throughout the world. Now Israel, France, China, Pakistan, India and for all I know Monte Carlo have got nuclear bombs. And vastly more common than bombs is the technology which gave us Chernobyl - so common indeed that the largest continguous landmass in Europe without nuclear power is probably Ireland, and that's only because the ESB failed in its gallant attempt to build the atomic power station at Carnsore Point.
In other words, we have had the makings of a nuclear disaster in Ireland for over half-a-century; and now, finally, in the year 2001, we have just got round to having a disaster plan, apparently to be implemented only after the disaster has actually occurred. As far as I can understand, the plan appears to consist of the issuing of iodine tablets by health boards after we are all covered in nuclear dust and glowing nicely thank you, no doubt by plucky messengers on bicycle carrying placards declaring "Take Cover" as they pedal through our streets blowing warning whistles.
In light of the recent - and apparently startling - discovery that terrorists do not normally give warning when they intended to murder people (after 30 years of murder on this island, the sequence of events in a terrorist attack is something we might have been expected to have mastered), we are all going to be given an iodine tablet by the Government in advance of the attack. This is good news. Maybe we will all turn purple, and we can die laughing.
Shield of denial
The presumption in our entire strategy - if that is the word for sitting on our thumbs for half-a-century and doing nothing - is that we will not be the primary target. The twin towers of New York no doubt were similarly protected by the impenetrable shield of denial. Actually, denial is not a bad reaction to a threat you can do absolutely nothing about; just so long as it is not so powerful as to cause complete and utter amazement when it fails.
Terrorists might choose to make a comparable example of us because of our own beloved Richard Ryan's presidency of the Security Council. There's almost nothing we can do to prevent attacks of such magnitude or suicidal determination. If someone, say, wants to release a phial of anthrax in the Point Depot, we can't stop them - not least, because we have denied our Defence Forces the material, the training and the culture which would make a serious defence of our sovereign territory a remotely feasible project.
SAM missile
Some years ago, the Army was given a SAM missile launcher to protect a meeting of a Council of European ministers. It was a waste of money. For if an aircraft was spotted approaching the meeting, was it to be shot down on sight without referral to higher command, killing anyone in it, and anyone on the ground? Was it to be fired after authorisation? So who the authoriser? Where was he to be located? What rank was he to be? Could he kill innocent people? And how long did he have before he decided to open fire? A minute? By then, the ministers might all be dead, and he might be fingering his way through the "situations vacant column".
I don't know where the missile and its launcher are at the moment; on blocks somewhere probably, which is the best place for them. Our pet SAM was one example of our fond delusion that we can do something about serious external threats to this country, as now is the Joe Jacob controversy. Frankly, I think by his utter inability to tell a lie without resorting to voluble Icelandic or Basque or whatever it was he was speaking, the Minister merely revealed a bewitching honesty. The campaign to make him Taoiseach begins here.