Nukes, Numbers & N Korea
by Benjamin on January 20, 2009
The outgoing US national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, was interviewed by the Financial Times yesterday (19 January 2008) and warned that “We strongly believe that there is an undetermined amount of highly enriched uranium in North Korea.
This sounds like a panic worthy statement, but I think it is another example of how some people use quantities and rhetoric to give no information at all. Let’s break down the statement to get the significance out into the open: “We” translation, ‘on my last day in the job, I’. “Strongly believe” meaning ‘think there is’, “an undetermined amount” – ‘zero, some or infinite amounts’ of “highly enriched uranium”, read as ‘substance x’ “in North Korea”.
So I translate: “On my last day in the job, I think there is zero, some or infinite amounts of substance x in North Korea”, and if we want to add the context, ‘however I did not feel that I should mention this until I could share no evidence, and could therefore surrender all responsibility for any possible problem.” Mr. Hadler has not told us anything at all really.
That is not to say that he isn’t right – in fact, going by what he has said, he is completely right that there is either some or no uranium in North Korea, but I don’t think it adds much to current knowledge…
Tags: Misleading Numbers, North Korea
