“Locally, while the lab grabs tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars for new, counterproductive nuclear weapons production, it plans to “cap and cover” and leave buried some 200,000 cubic yards of toxic and radioactive wastes that will permanently threaten our precious water resources.”
My View Jay Coghlan – The Santa Fe New Mexican | September 10, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
The New Mexican‘s recent editorial on Los Alamos National Laboratory noted “LANL’s astounding growth” (“LANL’s growth creates pressure on safety,” Our View, Aug. 31). Cancer is defined as uncontrollable cellular growth invading other parts of the body. That is fitting here as the lab metastasizes into the city of Santa Fe (in English, “Holy Faith”). The potentially terminal disease is a second nuclear arms race. Ex-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said we survived the first arms race only by luck.
Where is the leadership, where is the vision? While busy legislating short-term nuclear pork benefiting the already privileged, our congressional delegation leads us toward Armageddon. This second arms race is more dangerous than the first because of multiple nuclear adversaries, new cyber and hypersonic weapons, and artificial intelligence. All of this destabilizes the old Cold War architecture of mutually assured destruction (which never really went away). But “MAD” is truly insane to begin with, involving total, civilization-destroying war.