I've got to respond to October Ghost--although I realize it's a bit belated:
He responded by directing an aggressive stance, forcing the Soviets into an unsustainable race. A lot of people though it was crazy (and scary), but in the end it worked. The government of the Soviet Union forced their own nation into economic collapse trying to keep pace, thereby provoking their own fall.
Trouble is, we haven’t reached "the end." Plutonium, friends, has a half-life of 24,400 years. Here’s what International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have to say about how this strategy has "worked":
The high price of nuclear weapons manufacture is not in money alone but in damage to public health and the environment. Intentional and accidental releases of radionuclides such as plutonium-239, iodine-131, cesium-137, carbon-14, and strontium-90 have contaminated air, water, and soil, increasing the risk and rates of cancer and other radiation-related diseases in some areas. Accidents and incidents at some of the nuclear weapons plants have released amounts of radioactive materials comparable to those released during the Chernobyl accident.
In the US alone, it has been estimated that more than a million uranium miners, employees of nuclear weapons laboratories and production factories, military personnel, and residents living near nuclear test sites and weapons factories have been exposed to harmful levels of radiation.
Indications are that exposures in the USSR have been higher than in the US. For example, half the workers at a production facility near Chelyabinsk were routinely receiving 100 rem per year in the 1940s and 1950s as compared to an average lifetime dose of 3 rem for workers at 3 major US weapons plants. The current US civilian exposure limit is 0.1 rem per year.
The need to prevent further radioactive pollution and to clean up the scores of contaminated sites around the world is urgent. The following examples of nuclear production-related incidents, accidents, and problems attest to the seriousness of this global public health problem.
* In the US, the death rate from lung cancer is 5 times higher in uranium miners than in the general population. This relative risk is likely to be similar in the USSR where uranium exploration and mining methods are basically the same.
* A 1986 study of workers at the Sellafield nuclear weapons plant in the United Kingdom showed a positive association between radiation dose and death rates from bladder cancer, multiple myeloma, leukemia, and lymphatic and bone cancer tumors. A 1989 study found that workers' children were 7-8 times more likely to develop leukemia if their fathers received a total radiation dose of 10 rem in the period prior to their conception.
* The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the largest nuclear weapons production facility in the US, similar to Chelyabinsk in Russia, and is considered one of the most radioactively contaminated sites on Earth. Over 475,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 were released into the atmosphere from Hanford between 1944 and 1957‹an amount equivalent to that released during the Chernobyl accident. Iodine-131 increases the risk of hypothyroidism and cancers of the thyroid gland. Some of these releases were intentional experiments to test ways of monitoring Soviet plutonium production. Residents were not notified of the releases because of national security concerns and were therefore unable to take precautions.
* A preliminary study of people downwind from Hanford indicates that over 20,000 children may have been exposed to the iodine-131, partially through contaminated milk and food. Of 270,000 people living in the area, 13,500 may have received more than 33 rads over a 3-year period‹well in excess of the 5-rad per year limit. Babies may have received a 2,900-rad exposure to their thyroids.
* Two-thirds of the high level radioactive waste produced by the US nuclear weapons complex is dumped at Hanford. Plutonium, uranium, strontium, technetium, cobalt, cyanide, hexone, carbon tetrachloride, phosphates, nitrates, fluorides, and other chemicals have been injected directly into the soil, stored in decaying underground metal drums, and even buried in cardboard boxes. Site officials at Hanford recently acknowledged that operators dumped 400 billion gallons of toxic and radioactive liquids into the soil. They are now admitting that the wastes have contaminated the ground water and the Columbia River. The river is a source of drinking water, food, and recreation for millions.
* A major accident involving the explosion of a high-level radioactive waste storage tank occurred in Kyshtym, near the Chelyabinsk plutonium production facility in 1957. This explosion released 20 million curies of radiation, including 1 million curies of strontium-90, which is associated with leukemia and bone cancers. Over 60,000 people were evacuated from the region, and 625 square miles of land was severely contaminated rendered uninhabitable to this day. The accident was not acknowledged by Soviet officials until 1989.
* A US investigation of the Chelyabinsk accident indicated that widespread contamination was caused by the unsafe waste management practices of dumping contaminated water directly into the Techa River and storing nuclear waste in open ponds rather than sealed tanks.
* In 1990, the US Department of Energy warned that 177 underground waste storage tanks at Hanford were made more potentially explosive by cleansing agents added in earlier years. These tanks present a serious situation, if not an imminent hazard.
Thanks, Mr. Reagan. However, the bigger problem is that, of course, he couldn’t get away with it if people didn’t support him. Why do I keep thinking of Gatsby—“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Damn us all. How do we (keep) let(ting) this happen? |
