It's not easy to remain calm about the potential for history to repeat itself with the large explosion, code-named "Divine Strake," scheduled to detonate in seven weeks only 150 miles west of St. George at the Nevada Test Site. It is expected to create a dust cloud that could reach an altitude of 10,000 feet. While it may not be seen in Southern Utah, long-term ramifications are feared to be felt without adequate means to control wind shifts of the radioactive particles caught in that dust from earlier nuclear tests.
The government contends the 700 ton blast - equivalent to 593 tons of TNT - is for conventional research purposes, but we've been lied to before regarding activities at the test site. We've also heard sudden changes in terminology to soothe concerns, which has once more yielded its ugly head as the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency altered its original nuclear reference in relation to the test to being merely an "improper" use of language.
Why does the government deem the population of the western United States so disposable? Thousands of downwinders - who have suffered and died from various cancers and other life-threatening illnesses caused by nuclear fallout from the 1950s and 1960s - can attest to the government's past falsehoods.
It is absolutely hypocritical of the U.S. government to initiate a war in Iraq against dictator Saddam Hussein on the basis of the development of weapons of mass destruction, only to create and promulgate low-yield nuclear devices. <snip>
http://www.thespectrum.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060411/OPINION01/604110322/1014
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