Smoke Signals

Everyone looked for smoke today, looking up at the roof of the Sistine Chapel. They got it right this morning, dark and thick, which they did not yesterday. The burning of the first ballot by the Conclave of Cardinals was ambiguous. The crowd began to shout with anticipation, since the first whiffs from the temporary chimney appeared to be white, the color that would signify that two-thirds of the 115 assembled were in agreement.

If they had, it probably would have meant that 77-year old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the man , the 265th Holy Father. It could have meant that his powerful and pointed remarks at the beginning of the Conclave had been taken to heart. He is the voice of conservatism, at John Paul’s side for two decades, telling the Pontiff to hold strong to the core values of the church.

But the clear smoke soon turned to black, and the bells of Saint Peter’s Basilica did not ring. Of course, some bells were tolling, somewhere, on the quarter hour. More ambiguity, though it is to be expected. There has not been an election in three decades. We will all have to grow together in this process.

The crowd was disappointed. There was a lot of smoke watching in Rome . Across town, not far from the sovereign Vatican property, besieged Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s failed to burn his bridges. He didn’t resign and take his center-right government with him.

I’m sure the Prime Minister is taking the focus on the roof of the Sistine Chapel as useful cover. Black smoke means failure to agree. White smoke and bells means there is a new Pope.

That is not the only roof being looked at this morning. I was playing with the new beta version of Google’s map program yesterday. It was more fun than working. The Google people just bought a commercial satellite company called Keyhole, a term I found vaguely disquieting.

It only took a couple mouse-clicks and I found Big Pink as it looks from space, as identifiable as the Great Wall of China . There was a time when doing something like this required a security clearance and a seat at a big machine behind copper -lined walls in the facility near the waterfront.

Now, Google has put it at our fingers and I will never have to rely on MapQuest again. Of course, you can’t do stereo-pairs on a home computer, the processing that puts two images together in a way that makes the image seem thee dimensional, like an old stereoscope. That permits precise measurement, and enabled a whole new field of intelligence analysis.

If I had that capability, I could establish where the biggest parking spots are located at Big Pink. Or anything, for that matter. I could drift over to the Vatican and look for smoke, or to the Western Desert , and look at the Nevada Test Site, and go into the nuclear monitoring business on my own.

I was there, at the place we tested our nukes, when the Murrah Building went sky-high, precisely on this day. The smoke dimmed the sky over Oklahoma City .

So this was a day to think about smoke, and smoke signals. I had something else on my mind. I zoomed out and dragged the image of North America across the screen until it disappeared into the broad Pacific. I crossed Japan with the power of my mouse. I zoomed in on the waist of the Korean Peninsula , looking for signs of smoke.

I found a little blob on the satellite image that could have been  Pyongyang . It is not a big city, as things go, certainly not the size of sprawling Seoul to the south. The North Koreans have thrown up some heroic buildings there, though, much larger than Big Pink. The Tower of the Chuche Idea is an impressive demonstration of self-reliance, and calculated to be bigger than the Washington Monument . The sports stadium, and the big squares for demonstrations of public adoration of the regime.

The Northerners are quite proud of what they have achieved, though hard work and grit, and I don’t blame them. But I have seen those structures in person from the top of the Tower, even the 100-story hotel that is invisible, since the elevators don’t work, and seeing it would be an admission of fallibility, something even the Pope does not like to acknowledge.

The Northerners will tell you that nothing in this city was taller than rubble after the war swept over it twice. The three million dead of the Korean War haunt them, even if it has largely faded from our memory. They cannot and will not admit that they started it. They have no need to associate the years with that war, only the number of the dead.

Likewise, their brothers and sisters to the south often refer to their history in short hand, the number signifying the event: 419 (massacre of students by Rhee Syng-man in April, 1960), or 518 ( Kwangju uprising during Chon Tu-Hwan’s coup in May 1980). I was there for that one. I don’t need to remember the date, either.

I scrolled up the peninsula from Pyongyang to look for a place 60 miles north. If the Google satellite had a hyper-spectral capability, I might be able to discern if the azaleas were blooming. Yongbyon is a place where they grow lush in the Spring. It is a romantic place in Korean literature, and in the 1920’s, when the Japanese ruled the peninsula, a poet named Kim So-wol penned these lines in Hangul:

“When you go away at last,
sickened with the sight of me,
know that I shall let you go,
saying nothing, make no fuss;

but climbing high on Yongbyon’s hills,
there I’ll pick azalea flowers,
armfuls of purple, just to spread
along the pathways as you go

Then go, with muffled parting steps
trampling down those flowers you find
strewn before your departing feet;

and when you go away at last,
sickened with the sight of me,
know that for the life of me
I’ll shed no tears then, no, not one.”

It is a powerful poem, a translation, to be sure. Some verse does not cross the languages well. But this effort by Brother Anthony of Taize conveys something quite profound about the Korean condition.

The reason I had been to the top of the Tower in Pyongyang was the same reason that scientist Robert Alvarez visited Yongbyon in 1994. There, on a reservation much larger than the Vatican , the North Koreans have constructed a nuclear park.

The fiction was that they were operating a Russian-provided graphite reactor to meet the chronic shortfalls of the national power grid.

I touched one, years ago, like the one at Yongbyon. It was at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow not long after my trip to the North. They call them “piles” for a good reason. They are constructed of graphite bricks, and move the nuclear materials nearer and further to produce energy.

The real point of the research at Yongbyon was to produce enriched fuel suitable for a weapons program, and they had the technology to do the rest, courtesy of Dr. A.Q Kahn, the father of the Pakistani bomb

I was looking for signs of smoke coming from the reactor complex. If there was white smoke, it meant that the complex was operational.

The commercial imagery people have detected it regularly since the North decided to start the reactor again. The Agreed Framework, by which North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production in exchange for fuel oil, economic cooperation, and the construction of two modern light-water nuclear power plants, was abandoned. Some policy thing, I understand.

They started the reactor again more than a year ago. Now, reports say that it has been shut down. They have to do that to extract the fuel rods for additional processing into weapons-grade material.

And that is what might be happening at Yongbyon, and why, thanks to the good people at Google, I able to look for smoke.

I could not find any. But I am not sure how often Google refreshes the imagery bank. The resources of a nation state might provide a daily update, and Google is not there. Not yet.

So consequently, I could not see the azaleas in bloom, nor evidence of nuclear re-processing. I’ll keep looking for evidence. Perhaps it will be a trail of purple blossoms.

That is likely to be the only sign of activity. Even satellites cannot confirm, or deny, the evidence of tears.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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