Discussion of Nuclear Matters.

1) Nuclear Power.

President Bush and his advisors suggest returning to the implementation of new nuclear plants as part of the solution to offsetting the recent energy crisis. There are a number of reasons why this is a bad choice. Previous extraction and handling of Uranium/Bauxite ore has not always been done in a responsible fashion. In the ground extraction phase, plutonium and other dangerous residues have been allowed to contaminate the ground and have often found their way into water systems. Workers extracting the ore have often received radioactive contamination and many face slow death from many types of cancers. These difficulties occur again at the milling stage. Nuclear power reactors discharge radioactive contamination into the environment. There is also a risk of the reactors melting down as in the case of Chernobyl with the resulting contamination of much of the entire land mass of the entire country of Belarus. Do we really want more of the above to occur? And now it has become evident that nuclear power plants are not secure against suicide terrorists. Apparently a suicide pilot bent on mass destruction could aim directly at some of the older nuclear plants and crash right through into the reactor core buildings. Even if a suicide attacker carrying a backpack with explosives could only penetrate into the nuclear spents fuel pool they could trigger something on the scale of Chernobyl.

2)Nuclear Weapons.

These are the most destructive weapons ever known to man. With mankind in a Kindergarten stage of moral development the power to destroy the world as we know it has been placed in our hands. The Bush Administration seems to think that producing more nuclear missiles, bombs, and warheads is a great way to stimulate the economy leading to much new employment. However dubious this way of thinking may be it might be all right if it could be guaranteed that these weapons will never be used. But who's kidding who? They've already been used and unless we somehow manage to pull them out of service for good, as was the hope of many nuclear activists, it's inevitable that they will be used at some point or launched accidentally or deliberately by some demented group. A major problem also exists with the storage of nuclear waste upon which both nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons depend.

3) Nuclear Weapons Testing.

Let's not delude ourselves. Further development and modernization (incredible that such a word should be used when speaking of nuclear weapons) of existing nuclear weapons will require more nuclear weapons testing. In the past this practice has not been done in a responsible fashion. For example, Greenpeace reports that dangerous radionucleides are leaking from the Aleutian Islands (Amchitka blasts) and likely from the Mururoa Atoll near Tahiti (French testing 1966-1996). It's a wonder that people in Las Vegas are not glowing in the dark (gamma rays from Strontium 90 buildup in the bones) from the huge amount of testing already done in Nevada. Has the world somehow changed now? What guarantee is there that nuclear testing will now be done in a responsible manner?

4Nuclear Defense Shield.

President Bush would like Americans to believe that placing more radar/computer systems and nuclear interceptors (not yet developed by the way) in places such as Alaska, Kauai and Iceland and moving weapons into space will protect major American cities. How naive! Mankind has had the good sense to keep a major continent (Antarctica) free of the ravages of rabid mineral hunters, etc. by using world treaties. Are we really not going to to the same with space (the New Frontier)? Will people really feel secure if just one country, even if it is the U.S., in control of space? And at what expense?

5)Nuclear Proliferation.

President Bush wants us to believe that the ABM and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and others like it are just a remnant of the Cold War and should just be thrown out along with the cobwebs. I imagine that one of the conscious/unconscious reasons for this line of thinking is the wish to sell nuclear weapons-systems to even more countries of the world and thereby stimulate the economy even more. However it should be acknowledged that the only way to contain proliferation of nuclear weapons so far has been by way of treaties of this ilk. We've even had to resort to MAD (Muturally Assured Destruction) in the past as a way of stopping a first nuclear attack {which again illustrates what a Kindergarten or even Preschool stage of morality mankind is at - you wipe me out, I'll wipe you out}. Let's not replace a system that is undoubtedly flawed but working (International Treaties) with one that can't even be guaranteed to work at all (Defense Missile Shield).

Rosemary I. Patterson, Ph.D., author "Mission Mururoa".