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Tuesday, June 02, 1998 By Tony Norman, Post-Gazette Columnist
Even the saber rattling on the Indian subcontinent wasn't enough to keep the Hubble Space Telescope from peeling back yet another layer of cosmic uncertainty last week.
With its sky-spanning lens focused deep into the heart of the constellation Taurus, the Hubble Telescope may have finally supplied a clue to one of astronomy's holy grails: evidence of a planet outside our solar system.
As odd as it may sound to those who think the film "Independence Day" settled the question satisfactorily enough, the existence of other worlds beyond Pluto has never been proven by direct observation, only inferred.
Because the universe is so incalculably vast, it offends our mortal sensibilities to think that our solar system's handful of planets and its dozens of moons are all there is that stands between us and the infinite monotony of time, space and stars.
But there it was, an object roughly four times the size of Jupiter and traveling like a fast ball in a downward arc from a binary star a paltry 450 light years away. Scientists are calling the gaseous sphere with its 130 billion mile luminous filament trailing behind it TMR-1C pending a closer look in August when the constellation it inhabits rises in our hemisphere.
While millions of us mused over the digitized image of what may well be the first photographic evidence of a truly alien planet, there was plenty of ghastly irony afoot back on Earth.
Pakistan responded to India's nuclear tests with several of its own. Suddenly the specter of nuclear winter reared its head for the first time since the implosion of the Soviet Union in the early '90s.
Because India and Pakistan already have had three wars since gaining independence from Britain 50 years ago, each country's vow not to use the first strike option they've worked so hard to develop at a cost of billions in economic sanctions rings a little hollow.
Because of the passions whipped up by the ruling national parties at their respective helms of state, chances of a nuclear war breaking out in Asia are better than they've ever been, especially with India racing to perfect a missile delivery system.
And, of course, the United States and its allies, many of them nuclear powers, carved out some morally dubious high ground from which to preach a watered-down version of disarmament as the crisis mounted.
Chiding the upstart nuclear states for their eagerness to join what was once an exclusive fraternity cold-blooded enough to destroy the world in the name of national security, our government looked ridiculous calling for a return to a status quo that leaves all nukes firmly in Western hands.
As international rhetoric fell flat and hypocrisy devalued negotiations even before they started, it became obvious to everyone who wasn't a hopeless ideologue that not a single nation on this planet has a "moral right" to hold its neighbors hostage to a nuclear threat.
There has never been a better time to engage India, Pakistan, our allies, Russia, China and the so-called "rogue states" in discussions about stuffing the nuclear genie back into a bottle. In our guts, we know the label on the bottle should read "no nukes" for everyone, including us.
Because of the tendency of things to fall apart, we shouldn't hold out any hope that our governments can maintain the shaky balance of terror in perpetuity. Governments rise and fall all the time, but arsenals are blissfully indifferent to the moral weight of those who wield them.
Democracies can be swept aside by authoritarian regimes and vice versa, but nukes are forever. The fact they are increasingly available to any sadist with the will to use them should put a very large lump in all of our throats.
One day, if we're really unlucky, the Hubble Telescope will turn its highly refined lens toward the smoky, thoroughly irradiated brown crisp of a planet that used to be a luscious, blue world full of life.
It will scan the surface for signs of the six billion suckers that used to believe a genocidal self-defense policy was better than negotiation or even turning the other cheek.
On that day, we'll truly have more in common with lifeless TMR-1C than we would ever have imagined.
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