Letters to the Editor November 21, 2004 The semi-annual Bird Food Brunch was a pecking success. Not only did everyone get enough to eat but plenty of scratch was donated to insure our local feathered friends a steady supply of Black Gold for the rest of the winter. A special thanks to everyone who attended and to Oliver, Stanley and Margaret Rogers for flipping sourdough operating the toaster and running errands. A sincere Thank You is due to Tiaga Ventures for allowing the unfettered use of their kitchen ware. Anyone who camps in the wilderness without Tiaga Ventures is, in this writers opinion, completely nuts. Take Care,
November 22, 2004 As I am often moved to do, in spite of past discouragements, I recently wrote a letter to our senior Senator, Ted Stevens. The topic was one I have recently found more appalling than most of the federal weapons concepts: the bunker buster – a small nuclear device, touted as a means of eradicating underground WMDs, structures, and hideouts of nefarious bad apples. It has been “christened” (and I use that word with its full spectrum implications) by the militaristic language contortion experts at the Pentagon, as: The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. Cute phallic inference, don’t you think? Well, Ted, as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, naturally was a vigorous supporter of this Armageddon precipitator, but I wrote to him anyway, as I thought it was just the sort of weapon which could get into the wrong hands and be used against ourselves as a very powerful terrorist tool. Too true, since it is small, a few kilotons of nuke force, the size of a small missile. Easily smuggled and launched. This seems like an inherently bad choice for a purpose which is really questionable. How many times is it crucial to get a small nuke to a depth of 20 or 30 meters in the soil and then detonate it? I hope you can see the huge deadly danger this concept contains. I sent my letter, and protested the weapons appropriation for all these reasons. What I got back is worth letting your readers know about. Senator Ted Stevens seems to have no idea what a nuclear detonation does. I came to this conclusion after reading the last paragraph of his letter to me. I quote it in its accurate entirety here: “Our nation already has theater and area, small, nuclear weapons. This amendment [to stop money for bunkerbuster development, offered by Ted Kennedy, and which I had asked Ted to support] would have prohibited research, which would review all potential weapons systems to attempt to destroy subterranean weapons of mass destruction. In the case of chemical and biological weapons, conventional weapons would spread these substances over a wide area. [Now here is where Ted waxes apocalyptic…] Nuclear weapons may be capable of destroying chemical and biological substances. If that is the case, such weapons could be made environmentally safe [my emphasis]. That is the reason to research this potential. The lifting of the prohibition now permits research of new and better tools to eradicate the threat of terrorism.“...and the rest of humanity, I guess. Ted is actually claiming in this letter that nuclear weapons can make biological and chemical weapons ENVIRONMENTALLY SAFE!! It would be good to give the Senator a ticket to visit the Hiroshima Memorial. There is nothing but death and huge human danger in this bunkerbuster concept. ANY nuclear detonations are highly radioactive and toxic for many years, and devastate wide areas, even those in the kiloton range, like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Senator Stevens’ claim is so basically wrong, naïve and frighteningly foolish, that his sanity is questionable. I couldn’t be more serious. If there is one thing that can be clearly learned from nuclear incidents and bombings, it is that they are NOT environmentally safe. Ask the residents around Chernobyl, Bikini Atoll, and Chelyabin in the Soviet Union, its secret nuclear fabrication site. Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims might be another good source of experience. What the senior Senator claims as fact is so perverse and deceptive that his judgment should be in doubt for all of us. This is not a man who should be in charge of our national defense appropriations. I am glad he is not the chair anymore, but his influence is still too strong. It’s time for him to get out of the senate before he makes any more irrational and utterly misinformed decisions which are clearly dangerous to life on earth. With great trepidation,
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