ROBUST DEPROLIFERATION (via Tom Morin)

Bracing for AIDS Crisis in Eurasia: U.S. Must Push Russia, India, and China to Pay Urgent Attention to Pandemic (Nicholas Eberstadt, March 7, 2003, Los Angeles Times)

It took less than a decade for the sub-Sahara's estimated HIV-positive population to jump from 8 million to today's 30 million. There is still no reliable means for accurate long-term HIV projections, but expert opinion is already contemplating mind-numbing totals for Eurasia in the years immediately ahead. By 2010, the intelligence council study argues, there could be nearly 50 million people living with HIV in just three of Eurasia's countries. Just seven years hence, in this grim imagining, as many as 8 million Russians could be stricken with HIV--more than one-tenth of the reproductive-age population. In China, the corresponding number for 2010 might be as high as 15 million. India's HIV count in 2010 could be 25 million.

If one looks a bit further into the future, the reverberations of HIV in Eurasia could be even worse. Even a relatively "mild" HIV epidemic could result in suffering of an entirely new magnitude. For the quarter-century spanning 2000-25, projections based on this "mild" scenario envision more than 40 million AIDS deaths just for Russia, India and China. That would be almost twice the death toll from the worldwide AIDS pandemic up to this point. In sub-Saharan Africa, the AIDS catastrophe has been mainly humanitarian; the economic and political repercussions of the disaster have been minimal because Africa is marginal to the modern world economy and the global power balance.

Not so Eurasia, which is a major and growing center of economic and military power. The now-unfolding HIV epidemics in Russia, India and China could directly and tangibly darken economic prospects for any and all of these countries. For the outside world, the costs of local AIDS disasters in each of these Eurasian centers would certainly be measured in terms of lost trade opportunities. And perhaps in other terms as well: We cannot forget that these three states maintain massive conventional armies and nuclear arsenals.

It can't be the case both that we have to be particularly concerned because a place like China is a military/geo-political threat and that we should help them out, can it? Or that we need worry about where the Russian and Indian nukes end up but we should just offer to help? Let them surrender their nuclear weapons first, and China reform its government, then help them. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 5:58 AM