Earth’s City Lights, created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS)
Donald Rumsfeld's behind-closed-doors show-and-tell at the Pentagon last night with FOXNews' Bret Baier led us -- with Google's help -- to the above map. We had heard of it before but never taken a closer look:
Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.
The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. (Compare western Europe with China and India.) Cities tend to grow along coastlines and transportation networks. Even without the underlying map, the outlines of many continents would still be visible. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers. In Russia, the Trans-Siberian railroad is a thin line stretching from Moscow through the center of Asia to Vladivostok. The Nile River, from the Aswan Dam to the Mediterranean Sea, is another bright thread through an otherwise dark region.
Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit.
And that was Rumsfeld's point as he showed Bret Baier an objet in his Pentagon quarters showcasing the photograph of North and South Korea (below), a jaw-dropping illustration of the difference between the darkness of totalitarianism and the light of political freedom:
"South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark," said Secretary Rumsfeld
A few excerpts from the Secretary's remarks at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in February spell it out with exemplary Rumsfeldian flair and wit:
The advance of freedom does not come without cost or sacrifice. Last November, I was in South Korea during their debate on whether or not they should send South Korean forces to Iraq. A woman journalist came up to me and put a microphone in front of my face -- she was clearly too young to have experienced the Korean war -- and she said to me in a challenging voice: "Why should young South Koreans go halfway around the world to Iraq to get killed or wounded?"
Now that's a fair question. And I said it was a fair question. I also told her that I had just come from the Korean War memorial in Seoul and there's a wall that has every state of the 50 states in the United States with [the names of] all the people who were killed in the Korean War. I was there to put a wreath on the memorial and before I walked down there I looked up at the wall and started studying the names and there, of course, was a very dear friend from high school who was on a football team with me, and he was killed the last day of the war -- the very last day.
And I said to this woman, you know, that would have been a fair question for an American journalist to ask 50 years ago -- why in the world should an American go halfway around the world to South Korea and get wounded or killed?
We were in a building that looked out on the city of Seoul and I said, I'll tell you why. Look out the window. And out that window you could see lights and cars and energy and a vibrant economy and a robust democracy. And of course I said to her if you look above the demilitarized zone from satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula, above the DMZ is darkness, nothing but darkness and a little portion (Inaudible.) of light where Pyongyang is. The same people had the same population, the same resources. And look at the difference. There are concentration camps. They're starving. They've lowered the height for the people who go in the Army down to 4 feet 10 inches because people aren't tall enough.
Korea was won at a terrible cost of life -- thousands and thousands and thousands of people from the countries in this room. And was it worth it? You bet.
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