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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (124835)	2/19/2004 4:04:11 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Uranium dust and salts can cause heavy metal poisoning if ingested or inhaled in sufficient quantity. Most common serious problem (actually quite rare) is kidney failure. A lot of people assume that depleted uranium is dangerously radioactive and will cause radiation damage, like cancers and birth defects. Experience on SI has convinced me that there is no reasoning with them.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (124835)	2/19/2004 5:02:11 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hoorary for noocular bombs on our side. No, no, no,no, Mq! Nukes are ugly, bad things, regardless of who has them, at least at this point in the history of the Stupid Human Race, while we're still acting like drunken chimpanzees. Look at it this way: Someone with great foresight in the late 1940s would have known that the genie would have inevitably popped out of the bottle and not offer anyone the option of fulfilling three wishes. The wise thing to have done was to utterly, ruthlessly and credibly destroyed the technology after using it in WWII, then instituted severe controls on the production of enriched material in atomic power plants because, face it, the first pro-life-[a]rators were the Rosenbergs. If we didn't have the evil things after WWII, the Russkies wouldn't have wanted them either since there would have been nothing to get MAD about Everyone wants the stuff because it makes your tribe powerful. Better to have gotten rid of the stuff forever, then controlled its development with an iron hand. The Russians gave the technology to the Chinese, we shared it with the Brits, Eisenhower went all loosey-goosey with Atoms For Peace, the Chinese gave it to the Pakistanis and probably the Indians, the Pakistanis gave it to the nutsoid N. Koreans who may be selling it to anyone with the dollars to pay for the technology, and now everyone is worried sick that OBL and his ilk will end up with the stuff. This was all perfectly foreseeable. It could have been nipped in the bud. The process will be repeated in 20 years when the issue won't be how to control large difficult to transport atomic weapons but how to deal with portable devices too difficult to detect. So, no, no hurrahs for our nukes or anyone elses'. They are too dangerous, and we're too collectively stupid to be trusted with them. No one is/was thinking ahead the 30 to 40 to 50 years which their danger requires. After we are all dead and gone, what guarantee is there that our successors won't go hog-wild stupid with our nuclear stuff, or that anyone else from the West who claims to have it "legitimately" won't get stupid and sell it to whatever nutzo group is ranting and raving at the time? It's too late now, of course. The jinni is out of the bottle. Just wait, there will be atomic holes all over the planet in cities like Delhi, Karachi, NYC, Tel Aviv, etc. I fear it's just a matter of time. We're simply not yet wise enough as a species to properly deal with this kind of weapon.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (124835)	2/19/2004 11:13:56 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

re: I like my side to do the using (of WMD), not the bad guys. Isn't that exactly what Saddam was thinking, when he gassed the Kurds? To him, the Kurds were the "bad guys", traitors who were siding with the Iranian enemy, and tearing apart the Iraqi nation. Saddam's justification for using gas against the Kurds, was better than the U.S.'s justification for nuking Japan in August 1945. If your side uses nuclear weapons, then you are the bad guys. Especially if you use them on an enemy who is so weak, he is already defeated, and poses no threat to you. Japan is a cold, infertile, rocky, overcrowded island, which doesn't grow enough food to feed the population, and lacks a long list of raw materials essential to making weapons. By August 1945, we had imposed an airtight blockade, sunk the entire Japanese fleet, and were bombing them at will. We killed 100,000 civilians in one raid on Tokyo, using conventional weapons. And we did such raids over and over, on all their cities, and they were powerless to hinder us. Using nukes was overkill. If the U.S. had had nukes in 1942, with Japan occupying Alaskan islands, and Germany at the gates of Moscow, then their use could have been justified as a defensive tool to end aggression. But that excuse was gone, by August 1945. Nukes are useless in our failing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. And they will be equally useless, to stop Jihad coming out of our real enemies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Nukes are and will continue to be useless to Israel, in defending against the Intifada (what are they going to do, nuke East Jerusalem?). Nukes will not help prop up our client despots in Egypt and Kuwait and elsewhere. They are big hammers, with no nails to hit. They are the wrong tool, and even threatening First Use is counterproductive.