The other thing we can't uninvent is the fallout.

Radiation from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the aboveground tests that the downwinders were exposed to, Chernobyl, and now depleted uranium, has half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years, has been carried all over the globe by the tradewinds, and can never be cleaned up.

We have yet to devise a way to safely dispose of nuclear wastes, and nuclear waste sites have been poisoning the environment around them and leaching through the soil into rivers and water tables. But Bush took every dime out of the Superfund that was supposed to help clean them up. I guess like he says about bin Laden, it isn't his priority.

Well, the genius who discovered nuclear fission, and the genius who gave that secret to the United States, both had personal knowledge of and experience with fascists.

Has it every occurred to anyone except me that nukes may not be the problem? That the problem may be those who believe that there is greatness and glory in causing as much suffering as possible to as many people as possible, while despoiling as much of the earth as possible for their own personal profit? And that after 5,000 years of their dominance of the planet, and untold billions of unnecessary deaths, and given the fact that it is impossible to reason with such people, could it be possible that nukes are the solution?

Imagine people so evil that they have no compunctions about destroying the earth and every living thing on it for their own personal profit and glory, and that the corruption of power is their only weak point. Maybe you, like Rob, would think that there is a possibility that they might change, and that there could be some sort of salvation. But I agree with Meitner and Einstein that the only possible solution is to give them a weapon so powerful that they cannot refuse it, even if it is guaranteed to destroy them along with us.

The question, as I see it, was not complex. It was whether we allow them to destroy our habitat and everything on it except for themselves, and to cause as much human suffering as possible in the process, or we give them a weapon so powerful that when they use it to destroy us, it will take them with us.

Every time I think of the innocent people who are being tortured and killed for profit at this very moment, I think that the closer that clock gets to doomsday, the sooner the suffering will end.

--Mark

by Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 29 quicklinks, 78 diaries, 980 comments) on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 10:21:08 PM