Take care with the Syrian 1000. The selection of the 1000 refugees Australia is to take from war-torn Syria will present Australian immigration authorities with quite a delicate problem. If efforts to prevent militants arriving are not successful, we can expect growing sentiments such as these expressed by Andrew Bolt in this morning’s Herald Sun suggesting that we stop immigration of Muslims altogether.

The slaughter begins. Move aside those Afghan war stories. The real slaughter, The Guardian headlines on page one this morning, is just about to begin.

I’m on the side of the badgers. As Animal Aid so forcefully puts it:

Since the early 1970s badgers have been blamed for spreading bovine tuberculosis (bTB), and dairy farmers have been asking for the right to kill badgers as a way to protect their animals from the disease.

The truth is that the disease is caused by the crowded, dirty conditions in which dairy cattle are kept, combined with the stress and poor health they suffer. In short it is the intensive way the animals are farmed not the badgers that cause the disease.

The government has run several studies, killing tens of thousands of badgers, to try and find out if reducing badger numbers will reduce the bovine TB. These studies have shown that killing badgers was very expensive and ineffective in preventing the spread of the disease.

Research has shown that movement of infected cattle around the country is the single most important factor in spreading bovine TB. Martin Hancox, zoologist and former member of the Badgers and Bovine TB Panel, says: ‘TB is appearing in areas that have been TB-free for 10 years, sometimes longer. The badgers were there all the time: are they supposed to have sat around for a decade and then one day decided to infect cows?”

Instead of blaming badgers, farmers must recognise that modern intensive production methods are the real cause of much of disease in cattle and other farm animals.

Confusing a conventional sword with a nuclear shield. Just in case you have nothing to worry about, I thought I should refer you to a recently published study that highlights how China’s nuclear weapons strategy runs the risk of escalation to nuclear war from a conflict beginning with conventional weapons. It is due, argue John W. Lewis and Xue Litai of Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Co-operation, to the unusual structure of the nation’s military. The location of missiles with conventional warheads (what the Chinese military call the “conventional sword”) and nuclear warheads (the “nuclear shield”) on the same bases means targeted enemies and their allies will not immediately be able to distinguish whether any missiles fired are conventional or nuclear.

This means that those enemies may justifiably launch on warning and retaliate against all the command-and-control systems and missile assets of the Chinese missile launch base and even the overall command-and-control system of the central Second Artillery headquarters. In the worst case, a self-defensive first strike by Chinese conventional missiles could end in the retaliatory destruction of many Chinese nuclear missiles and their related command-and-control systems.

“That disastrous outcome would force the much smaller surviving and highly vulnerable Chinese nuclear missile units to fire their remaining missiles against the enemy’s homeland,” Lewis and Xue warn. “Escalation to nuclear war could become accelerated and unavoidable.” Policies that have led to conventional and nuclear weapons doubling up at the same base could cause, rather than deter, a nuclear exchange.

You will find the details at Making China’s nuclear war plan on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website.

News and views noted along the way: