More buffoonery. The idiots that are protesting it and the fools that planned it.
WASHINGTON - Divine Strake was promised to blow a hole in the earth and create a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert.Strake? Had to look that one up.
Instead, it blew open old wounds for Utahns who had been promised Cold War atomic tests would be safe, and the hurt, betrayal and rage that poured out left the Pentagon with little choice but to announce Thursday it was scrapping the test.
Michelle Thomas spent the day in tears.
"I've cried all day long. I just can't yet grasp it," said Thomas, a St. George Downwinder who opposed Divine Strake. She has had cancer and suffers an immune deficiency she blames on exposure to radiation.
"I just felt such an overwhelming relief," she said. "You just think, 'Oh my gosh. We matter.' "
a continuous band of hull planking or plates on a ship; also : the width of such a bandUmm. Ok.
First off, who was the brain-child that thought up this test? You'd think that the sight might be a bit of an issue to the public, but apparently these guys didn't bother actually using any grey matter. And their spokesman is a bloody imbecile:
Expert witnesses in Hager's lawsuit said, if the test went as planned, it could create a new generation of Downwinders. The blast, they said, would spread radioactive debris over hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, causing birth defects and cancer cases in the downwind population.What an absolute idiot.
Had it not been for an off-hand comment in a briefing of reporters, the test may very well have gone ahead without fanfare last June.
"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," Defense Threat Reduction Agency Director James Tegnelia said last March.
When he made the comment, the environmental studies had been done, approval for the test had been given and plans were going ahead to prepare the site for the test. But the "mushroom cloud" image resonated enough to make it into brief stories about the meeting, and the opposition started to build.
The downwinders are hyping the issue far beyond the realistic evidence. Comparing a conventional detonation to a nuclear one has no comparison at all with the radiological after effects. None the less, wouldn't it just have been easier to have done this some place else?
Now I'm wondering how much this bit of stupidity has cost the citizens?
2 comments:
You have to remember that just because the bomb itself is not radioactive does not mean it can't throw that type of stuff into the air; there are still a lot of radioactive areas that are dangerous to disturb. We have some those in the western area of Utah in the Dugway area that are dangerous for people to enter because of radioactivity.
Considering I have 13 years of experience in the nuclear field and specifically in Health Physics, I'm well aware of the related risks with radioactivity.
Unfortunately, everyone has assumed that they proposed detonating this bomb in a "do not disturb" zone. That assumption is ludicrous. The military is fully aware of where the bad areas are, and obviously wouldn't be testing in those areas. This also shows an assumption that they were so incompetent that their environmental impact study some how missed the radioactivity. Those studies have huge requirements and testing for radioactivity is one of them.
It's sad that the public in general assumes that the professionals that work for the government are as moronic as those that set policy.
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