Having spent much of the past 24 hours going through the State Department documents released by Wikileaks I can honestly say the most amazing revelation is the lack of revelations in the documents. Not that it isn’t shocking to see some of these reports in black and white, but most of the Wikileaks “bombshells” are simply confirmation of news reports discussed here, the other “Big” sites, on my blog The Lid, or other sites,  many times before. Here are some examples of the “old news”:

• Arab states see Iran as a danger:  The revelation that Israel is not the only nation in the Middle East suggesting that the “head of the snake” be cut off is nothing close to new. Even the fact that other nations in the Middle East want nuclear technology because Iran has been closing in on the nuclear weapons are have been discussed before. I would also note that the James Baker meme (subscribed to by Obama and Hillary Clinton) that solving the Iran problem is linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was totally destroyed by the Wikileaks release. There was not one mention of “linkage” by an Arab state in the released cables.

• North Korea is supplying missiles to Iran: Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. Again this is old news. We also know that North Korea built a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert.

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Not so long ago, writers, editors, concerned world citizens and deep thinkers of all kinds were consumed with the idea of a coming global catastrophe that seemed implacable and virtually unavoidable. When it comes to covering today’s debates on global warming, we might want to take a step back and recall this earlier, somewhat chillier 1980s obsession with the fate of the earth – that is, of course, The Fate of the Earth, the title of a three-part series by Jonathan Schell first published in The New Yorker, then republished as a popular book by Alfred A. Knopf in 1982.

Jonathan Schell

This influential series was all about the unstoppable, world-ending consequences of nations (especially the United States) clinging to their nuclear weapons. The fate of the earth, according to Schell, was to be nuclear annihilation, human extinction, the end of all life. Game over. You’re dead. We’re all dead. Your children are dead. Your dog’s dead. Your children’s children won’t exist. Finito.  It was a very popular idea at the time, much discussed at cocktail parties, sidewalk reefer breaks, and editorial meetings. Schell had caught the ear of the culture.

(To judge by this piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times by Schell’s older brother, Orville, pessimism seems to run in the family.) (more…)