My uncle passed away last week. I hardly knew him, except from stories my dad told me. I was upset by his death, but felt a sense of calm knowing that his life would be easier. I’m not saying he’s better off dead, but his life, and those around him were hurting. He’d given up a while ago, and had resolved himself to a life of solitairy confinement with the bottle.
When I heard of his death, I cried a little. I cried for my dad, for my grandparents, and for his wife and children. I’ll miss his voice, and I’ll miss that my father had a brother. But his death didn’t frighten me, or make me as sad as reading this.
Nuclear weapons are something that we should be ashamed of. Sure, adolecent boys often joke about nuclear this, nuclear that, but the fact that we have devloped something that can kill so many, so permenantly, and so impersonally makes me shudder. The fact that we are re-evaluation our use, or revving up our use of these weapons is what made me cry. It wouldn’t scare me as much knowing that it was truely Bush JR.’s idea, but it wasn’t. Knowing that his whole presidency is handled by much smarter, and much more ruthless people is what scares me. Knowing that people who did this want it because it will allow them to have their oil, or have their way much more quickly, and easily that before.
It scares me that in a year and a half, we could go from a president whose major shortcoming was his desire for sex (is that a shortcoming? or is the lack of self-control) to someone who could re-deploy nuclear weapons so quickly. People joke about how similar the canidates were in the last election, and they may be right. But people forget how different the people behind these canidates were, once you get beyond the canidate.
I just read a story about a firm who could test the detainees at Camp X-ray, and in Afganistan to see if the concentration of plutonium in their body was higher than the normal ambient plutonium level for humans for evidence that al-queda had access to nuclear fuel. The fact that there is a background level of plutonium in every human is scary. The reason we all have some plutonium in is the result of open-air nuclear tests earlier this century by the US Govt.
My point in all this is Nuclear Weapons are Bad. We’re already the most destructive culture in the world. We don’t need to re-involve nuclear weapons to prove it.
Peace.