Voices from the Earth: Current Issue

SRIC Friends

Table of
Contents
2001: A Nuclear Waste Odyssey
From the President
Uranium Bailout Bill
ENDAUM Gains Ground
Dumping on Tribal Land
Nevada Opposes a Repository at Yucca Mountain
WIPP: Expanding or Not?
Black Ranch Appeal Update
Shedding Light on Uranium Operations in Siberia
Book Reviews
Mining Reclamation in New Mexico
Glossary

"Federal policy…has been to assure that "waste management problems shall not be deferred to other generations," and many environmental groups have shared the same view. Geological burial - at first glance anyway - looks like an ideal way to accomplish that since, after all, it "removes" the wastes from the environment and solves the problem once and for all. But in many ways entombment does just the opposite. It deliberately poisons a portion of the natural world for an endless stretch of time and in doing so it not only leaves future generations with thousands of tons of the most dangerous rubbish imaginable on their hands but makes it as difficult as the state of our technology permits for them to deal with it. We cannot promise our children - never mind those who will follow hundreds or thousands of years hence - that they will be safe from the wastes. And so long as that is so, we are not taking the problem out of their hands so much as we are taking the solution out of their hands."

— Kai Erikson
"Out of Sight, Out of Our Minds"
The New York Times Magazine
March 6, 1994.

Short Fuse to Catastrophe: The Case for Taking Nuclear Weapons Off Hair-trigger Alert
Joint Report of the Back from the Brink Campaign and the Project for Participatory Democracy, Washington, DC: Back from the Brink Campaign, 2001 20 pp., $1.50, call for price on multiple copies, paper

Are there thousands of nuclear bombs on hairtrigger alert that could be launched within a few minutes and destroy much of the world? Most people answer the question with a strong NO. But the correct answer is YES.

This report states: "keeping thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert is a colossal accident waiting to happen, an accident the world cannot afford, " and it recommends that the United States and Russia immediately take steps to "de-alert" their weapons.

Such a catastrophe is not far-fetched. In 1995, Russia mistakenly identified a research rocket fired off the Norway coast as a nuclear weapon and began preparing to launch a retaliatory attack on the U.S. Fortunately, Russian satellites plotted the rocket's flight and called off the alert. Now, as Russia's financial problems grow, its monitoring systems are deteriorating and the likelihood of miscalculations also increase.

De-alerting would lengthen the time needed to launch nuclear weapons from less than 25 minutes, to hours, or days, depending upon the methods used. Many military leaders, cities, political leaders, 100+ nations in a 1999 United Nations Resolution (which the U.S. and Russia opposed), and many citizen organizations worldwide support de-alerting.

The report suggests various ways that de-alerting could occur, and specific actions that individuals and groups can take to help convince political leaders that the time to de-alert is now!

If you are interested in writing reviews, please let us know via e-mail: Info@sric.org, or call us at 505-262-1862. You can also write to us at Voices, c/o SRIC, PO Box 4524, Albuquerque, NM 87106. Thank you.