If you Indians or Pakistanis really wish to do something useful with your nuclear weapons, might I suggest that you point them at the UN Earth Summit in Johannesburg next September? Not merely will you find the summit a target-rich environment, with 60,000 of the world's most self-important individuals being simultaneously flatulent in the one place, and nicely ripe for zapping, but you'll be doing something really useful for the environment.
The conference, through air travel, ground transport and hotel pollution, is expected to generate 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases, which is about what 450,000 Africans generate in a year - the difference being, of course, that the Africans produce their gases to some good purpose. This is considerably more than you can say about these nauseatingly self-congratulatory ecofests which regularly move from one enchanting country to the next, stripping the local oyster-beds, lobster farms and foie gras factories bare of their produce before moving on to the next world famous beauty spot.
Vapid aspirations
You know exactly what's going to be said in advance at these exercises in locustry: condemnations of the US for this or that, with countless speeches full of vacuous, vapid aspirations unrelated to any realisable goals. Meanwhile, round the conference edges, the whirling dervishes of environmentalism - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and World Wide Fund for Nature Conservation - circle in a dizzying display of righteousness, and are accorded an unquestioning deference by the media.
They could all have stayed at home and done much the same, and to as much effect, but of course that is not the point of these conferences. Their purpose is to establish a global hierarchy of moral supremacy,especially over the wealth-creating sector, which is ritually reviled with the intellectual coherence of children seeing the pantomime villain enter stage left. Exxon? Hissssss! Montsanto? Boooh! BP? Assassinnnns...
Ecology is the state religion of our time; but instead of having Vatican councils every 500 years or so, we have the environmental conferences every five years. Formerly the inquisitors' fire and disembowelling knife and the fear of eternal damnation were used to curtail heresy; now orthodoxy is assured by the undergraduate shriek that opponents are reactionary stooges of the US, and of multinational globalisation.
Logic doesn't make an appearance in any of this, because there is no logic behind these conferences, their exotic locations, their regularity, and certainly not their demands. These are vigorously directed at others, but seldom and so little at their participants. So the Rio ecojunket of 10 years ago attracted 17,000 delegates and 9,000 journalists. This autumn's conference in South Africa is a splendid testament to eco-restraint: numbers are expected to be up by some 40,000, with some 60,000 delegates and correspondents.
Not content with that, the ecojunketeers are currently holding a preliminary conference - in Bali, naturally. But if they needed a preliminary conference, no doubt to enable the organisers to hone their banqueting and their bottle-opening skills to perfection, they could have chosen Portadown in July. Or Grimsby in February. Or Chernobyl at any time.
Moral superiority
Of course, such places are not chosen for UN ecojunkets. Moral superiority never tastes quite so good as it does after a sumptuous eight-course banquet with fine wines, or while scuba-diving through a coral reef, or on wildlife safaris through a tropical rain forest or an African game park.
Now as it happens, nobody anywhere wants to see the rain forests vanish or the biodiversity of the planet be diminished. But the residents of no country in the world actually say: Here, make us measurably poorer in order to protect the rain forests.
Nobody voted in our own general election to cut economic growth to save the environment. Nobody campaigned on a platform of higher unemployment in Ireland for the sake of some Pacific whales or the Australian waggawagga trees.
Bono's sermonising is ceaseless and indefatigable, but so far as I know, he has not shifted his bank account from Dalkey (or Geneva or Zurich or wherever it is) to the a/c Robert Mugabe, The Zimbabwean National Bank, Rue Rainier, Monte Carlo, or The Somali Central Treasury, c/o Chief Warlord, Mogadishu. And quite right too. Nor would I.
Not one single European country has achieved the emission goals set at Rio or Kyoto; and none will match whatever farcical figures are set at Bali and South Africa this year. This is because they are not intended to be met; their purpose, as in any religious service at which everyone swears never to sin again, is to make the participants of these conferences of the fat and pampered feel better about themselves. Then they head homeward, their planes trailing plumes rich with thousands of tons of greenhouse gases.
Green revolution
A generation or so ago, the two poorest nations in the world were China and India. Millions died of hunger annually. Now both are net food exporters, largely because of the green revolution brought about by companies such as BP, Exxon, and Monsanto, the comic-book villains of the environmentalists - apparently because they are motivated, not by any self-proclaimed virtue, but by profit, just like the rest of us.
Environmentalists increasingly resemble counter-reformation Jesuits in their theological campaigns: the lives of real people, of nameless peasants along the Ganges or the Yalu rivers, count for far less than the triumph of obscure moral abstractions.
They don't want the victory of life; instead they prefer to win arguments. And to judge from the way most governments fall on theirs knees before them, the environmentalists are winning this one.