Kerry’s Nuclear Danger
Thursday, September 30, 2004
adamyoshida.com
In a little-mentioned period of his life, John Forbes Kerry served the Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under a fellow named Michael Dukakis. During that time, in 1984, he drew up an Executive Order, which Governor Dukakis signed, that promised, “No funds shall be expended by the Commonwealth for crisis relocation planning for nuclear war.” To put it more plainly, Kerry’s order said, in essence, that the state would refuse to cooperate with efforts to evacuate people to safety in the event of a conflict between the United States and Soviet Union.
Some may laugh at the idea of “Crisis Relocation Planning” with regard to a nuclear conflict. After all, we’ve all been taught in school that nuclear war is “unwinnable” and that, if it were to ever occur, the world would be destroyed by so-called “Nuclear Winter.” However, I’ll tell you who didn’t and doesn’t laugh at the idea: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to FEMA estimates in the 1980’s, the evacuation of cities and other urban areas in the event of a nuclear war would have saved the lives of between eight and twelve percent of the US population or, in other words, somewhere between twenty and thirty million people at that time.
Civil Defense planners believed that a successful evacuation of US cities prior to a nuclear conflict would mean the difference between a war with ten million US and a war with forty million or more dead. Moreover, in the absence of an organized evacuation, long-term casualties would be much higher since, under an orderly government-organized and planned evacuation, people with skills urgently needed in the post-attack recovery phase would receive first priority for evacuation and shelter.
Certainly, in my view, then-Lieutenant Governor Kerry must have known these things at the time. Yet he pushed his order anyways. Why? One conclusion is this: Kerry was then running for the Senate as the uber-peacenik candidate and he was willing to potential sacrifice the lives of a few million people in his state in order to advance that ambition.
The second, equally plausible, conclusion is even more ominous: that he fully knew the dangers of the policies he proposed but choose to ignore them because they served his larger policy goal, namely that of forcing unilateral nuclear disarmament upon the United States.
Or, perhaps, it was a little of each.
John Kerry, of course, was a leader within the “nuclear freeze” movement. This group advocated that the United States should, in the face of a continuing Soviet threat, unilaterally stop production of nuclear weapons in the hope that the Soviet Union would do the same. In other words, in the vain hope of gaining concessions from a determined foe, Senator Kerry was willing for the United States to give up its primary means of defense.
During his race for the Senate in 1984, Kerry managed (after changing one of his answers) to get a 100% score from a group calling itself “Freeze Voter ’84”. This endorsement, among other things, helped to propel him past liberal Congressman James Shannon in the Democratic primaries. While I lack a copy of the questionnaire that earned him that rating, I’m sure it makes interesting reading. Someone should ask Senator Kerry if he stands by his positions today because, I put it to you ladies and gentlemen, that someone capable of getting 100% from a peacenik anti-nuclear group in Massachusetts is someone incapable of leading the United States in wartime.
Where does Senator Kerry stand on the great nuclear issues or our day?
He’s against the development of a new generation of low-yield, ground-penetrating nuclear weapons designed to destroy enemy WMD facilities buried deep under the Earth.
He voted for a National Missile Defense system, but now he says that he wants cut funding for it. He says this even as Iran races towards both advanced ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons while North Korea apparently has both.
Another question whose answer we do not have, but must know is this: would Senator Kerry order the use of nuclear weapons against a nation which attacked or assisted in an attack upon the United States using nuclear or biological weapons? If not, how would he respond to such an attack?
By all appearances John Kerry, if elected President, plans to attempt to trust our present-day enemies just as he once called upon the nation to trust that the Soviet Union would react peaceably to moves towards unilateral disarmament upon the United States. He’s willing to put his faith in our enemies instead of our arms.
He says that he’s going to give Iran “nuclear fuel” on the condition that they use it only for peaceful purposes.
He says that he’s going to directly negotiate with the North Koreans, even though the North Koreans used the cover of the last agreement we signed with them to develop their present nuclear arsenal.
If, as it seems, Senator Kerry is incapable of dealing with the issue of nuclear weapons in any sense other than a political one then, truly, he is unfit to be the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. A man who once sought to deny Americans the shelter that may have saved their lives in a nuclear war is not the man to lead America today. A man who trusts our enemies more than he trusts our people cannot be trusted to effectively lead and defend our people in a time of war. |
