Saddam's nuclear arsenal - 27 November 1998

For many years I was lucky in guessing that by the time my talk was being heard, the topic would be fresh, if not right on.

You may wonder why there should ever be a problem about this. Well the problem haunts the broadcaster, every time he sits before a microphone and yet is something that probably never even occurs to most listeners. The fact is that the spoken word is so topical, everybody believes it's being spoken at the moment of hearing, even if you know, if you've noticed, the fine print which says "recorded". Even veteran radio critics are as hypnotised by the medium as five-year-olds. What they hear is being spoken now, as witness this sad story which was bound to happen sometime and, one weekend in the spring of 1961, did.

It was a slack weekend. In those days I recorded the talk on Friday. I could see nothing earth-shaking, anyway I'm not a pundit. There's always something going on round the corner, at the grocer's or the lunch counter, likely to interest more people than for instance, this weekend, a pronouncement by Mr Kenneth Starr that some of the things that a cooperating witness can do is assist us in consensual monitoring which we described at a high level of generality. Ach so.

So though, of course, I have no idea now what I decided to talk about, that dull weekend, except to hope it was some quirky or odd or funny thing that would touch some human beings come Sunday morning. The talk was, as usual, recorded, timed, packaged and flown overnight and passed by British Customs as non-contraband and non-inflammable. It was played, as usual in those days, first on Sunday evening and then, for the larger, motor-car audience, on Monday morning. It just so happened that for the first time in ages, a prominent English radio critic had chosen to review that talk.

Came Sunday morning and by dawn's early light, he knew, all the world knew, that the Russians had overnight pulled a fast one on the United States. They had rocketed Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin around the earth. The first human to travel in space. Of course I knew it, as soon as the critic did. Did he stop to say, "Of course he must have recorded this a day or so ago"? No, he sat down and wrote with relish: "One thing you must say for Cooke. When the last, the final bomb has dropped on us all, he'll still be there in New York, waffling away as usual".

This reminiscence is by way of a protective shield against the chance that by the time these words are, as we say, aired, Iraq may be thundering with exploding American and British missiles. If you know, I'll know. Now I ought to say that this time, as I talk, there's every sign that Saddam Hussein may have had a point in having his prime minister say, in I must say, more pungent English than Mr Kenneth Starr uses, "All the documents we have, we have shown you. All that we don't have, we don't have. All the documents that don't exist, don't exist."

The surrender treaty agreement mentions the right to inspect "arms-related evidence", a phrase which Mr Starr, I'm sure, would gladly spend several months explicating, if that's the word he'd have in mind, which I think it is, if he were ever hired by Saddam Hussein. But there are two other nasty reasons for withholding the missiles which give us pause and which I'm sure Saddam always has in mind. One is, we know what the Iraqi people would be seeing on their television sets the first evening after an air strike. The veteran Washington commentator, Meg Greenfield has put this better than anyone.

"There are plenty of critics of the American military who will scoff at the very idea of such squeamishness, citing our introduction of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War Two, our saturation bombing of Dresden and a range of brutal actions in Vietnam. But all that took place a long time ago, as these things are measured, and the context of our lives is different now, We were actively and continuously engaged in combat then, for one thing and for another, everything was not, as now, visible instantaneously, the deaths and the maimings and above all, the dying infants and their wailing, desolate parents. Many such pictures have been imprinted on the national consciousness and tug us back from our fighting resolve." This, I believe, is very true.

The second, more hard-hearted misgiving is one the White House and the Pentagon have been wrestling with literally for years. When a poll is taken and people are asked "If Saddam doesn't allow full inspection, should we bomb the forbidden sites or not?" The question is meaningless and so, therefore, is the answer because part of the national consciousness too is a picture of the bombing targets, like something as solid and visible as an ammunition dump or a presidential palace.

A truer question would be "How do you attack a test tube or a file of papers describing a poison, both of which are buried somewhere underground in a desert larger than California?" It has already been calculated that to have the luck of destroying even a quarter of the relevant evidence, weapons, research tools, gas tubes, chemicals, the aerial bombing would have to be so abominably widespread as to cause the massacre of many thousands of children and those despairing mothers, all seen at once tonight and every night, throughout the world, leaving whatever other impression, a guilty impression of the United States as a heartless monster.

Since the invention of television, I don't know what the answer to this is. So finally, and now surprisingly, being talked openly about by the president, Secretary of Defence and some of the Congress, is the thought, the longed-for possibility, of overthrowing Saddam and his regime and that has brought up a subject that has long been a forbidden phrase in Congress – ground troops. Desert Storm Number Two, with certainly no sanction from the United Nations.

Well whatever has happened, missiles or no missiles, these things will be on the minds of the administration and – if it has happened – on everybody's mind. In the meantime, if we've threatened yet another final ultimatum, what is on the minds of at least half the American population (and that's about the number of Americans who own stocks), is how to explain the all-time record closing figure of the New York Stock Exchange, of the Dow Industrials that is, last Monday.

In July, it seems more like a year ago, we were revelling in the euphoria of a never-ending Clinton prosperity, matching the Coolidge prosperity of the 1920s. Practically zero inflation, lowest unemployment rate in, how many years – 20, 30? – and four times as many people in the stock market as in the joyous days of Coolidge and the market expanding and expanding. Or was it just a swelling bubble, ready to burst?

And then, dark clouds to spoil our blue skies came drifting in quickly from Japan, So Japan was not the brilliant dream economy after all, Worse was to follow – the collapse of the economies of other south-east Asian countries. Then we had the first warnings that Brazil, the bellwether of the South American economies, was in grave trouble and that gave the first prod to the North American optimists.

By last week all the talking heads on the financial channel, experts of all kinds who tell us why and what for most of 24 hours a day, they were beginning, for the first time, to argue. After several hundred-point drops and the market going down from its 9,000 peak into the 7,000s, were we or were we not sliding down the Gadarene slope into at least a valley, if not the pits and then came the soaring Roman candle of last Monday. Like a dazzling sentence out of Tom Wolfe – bang, flash, whoosh, up 214, a record close.

Next morning, no later, we had definitive explanations of where the United States now stands, of its prosperity – better, its economy. I will give you briefly the two extreme views from Mr Optimist and Mr Pessimist, though I hope you understand both of them would claim to be objective scientific analysts.

The optimist: Wall Street panicked this summer but the sky did not fall. This week the big stocks hit record highs, even junk bonds showed new life. There is new confidence in corporate takeovers. Brazil has been bailed out, Japan is taking promising steps to recovery. The International Monetary Fund is saving Russia. These moves and the federal reserves, three cuts in interest rates, have done the trick.

The pessimist: Well, has it? The whole preceding argument is wishful thinking. Huge stock increases with no matching earnings make the United States stock market a very risky place indeed. Consumer credit is at an all-time high and worse, household savings have dropped for the first time in 60 years. In short, the American people cannot go on for ever spending more than they earn. That is the frightening nub of it.

These are very brief, drastic summaries of arguments spun out with much impressive, if incomprehensible, jargon. It's a happy surprise therefore, that the more persuasive pessimists' view comes right down to what Mr Micawber told young David Copperfield.

Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19.19.6: result, happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20.0.06: result, misery. The blossom is blighted. Take your choice, in the meantime, in parting from a friend, seize on all the jolly clichés – take care, be well, enjoy and have a nice day.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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