The Thought of Bombs Will Take Over Our Minds (Page 1 of 2)

“The thought of bombs will take over our minds,” said 10-year-old Emma McLeod at the public hearing on nuclear weapons in Oak Ridge Feb. 26.

A lot of people spoke that day — it was a hearing by the National Nuclear Security Administration on its Draft Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the Transformation of the Nuclear Weapons Complex. Such a long, tortured title might have discouraged some from even trying to understand what was going on, but the stakes were high enough that several hundred not only made the effort to figure it out, but came to the hearing.

The current public comment process is really a referendum on nuclear weapons, and you have until April 10 to weigh in. You can e-mail comments to Ted Wyka at complextransformation@nnsa.doe.gov.

Approximately 130 people spoke at the public hearing, and 90-or-so were against the plans to build a new nuclear weapons complex (price tag: $150 billion of your tax dollars); 40 were gung-ho for more bombs and a new bomb plant in Oak Ridge. Curiously, almost every single person who spoke for nuclear weapons stood to gain, either politically or financially, from the new bomb plant. Those who spoke against it had no personal stake in the agenda — except the one that we all have: Nuclear weapons, even our own bombs, threaten our lives every day, whether we use them or not.

As I think back on the hearings, I realize that of all the speakers who raised concerns — that we will lose jobs in our community, that other people will want bombs if we continue making them, that old facilities are crumbling and need to be replaced, that a new weapons complex will add to the environmental burden of already polluted places — it may have been Emma who said the scariest thing of all: “The thought of bombs will take over our minds.”

A letter was read at the hearing, signed by the county executives and mayors of nine East Tennessee counties — you might have seen it in the News Sentinel. The letter supported building a new bomb plant to produce weapons of mass destruction in Oak Ridge. As I listened to a spokesman read the letter, I wondered if these men (They’re all men.) turned it over in their minds as they scanned the letter before they signed it. “Yes, I am going on record as supporting the production of weapons of mass destruction… ”

I doubt it. And the contractors who dutifully came to the microphone to make sure they were marked down in the “pro-jobs” column — did they wrestle with their consciences? One young man from Middle Tennessee State University finished his comments with a question: “After all,” he said, “What are nuclear weapons but larger versions of the incinerators of Auschwitz?”

We shudder at the comparison. Several years ago at a public hearing on making bomb tritium in the Watts Bar reactor, a speaker drew that same comparison and the Department of Energy hearing official took offense. He cited his Jewish faith and denounced the speaker for implying a similarity between nuclear weapons production and Hitler’s “final solution.”

But if we step back from our personal feelings (Can we?) and look coldly at the comparison, we can understand why some might think them comparable. The primary difference, of course, is nuclear weapons are far more destructive and far less discriminating than the horrific Nazi program to exterminate Jews, gays and other “undesirables”. A thermonuclear warhead detonated above Manhattan would incinerate several million people in an instantaneous firestorm, but it would not choose between Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic or any other religious, racial or ethnic discriminator.

In either case — hideous death camps that take lives slowly, or thermonuclear weapons that do it in a blinding flash — the purpose is to achieve a political end by killing people en masse in numbers we can scarcely comprehend.

There has not always been such a blind embrace of nukes in Oak Ridge. In the earliest days, before the thought of bombs had taken over their minds, physicists, chemists and engineers who helped produce the materials for the first atomic bombs in Oak Ridge signed a petition to President Harry Truman urging him not to drop the bomb in a populated area. An effort for a similar petition urging Truman to use the bomb on the Japanese garnered only two signatures.