Why Was It So Hard to Stop Above Ground Nuclear Testing?

There was no lack of proof that this practice was incredibly dangerous. Even as a kid, I knew that the mushroom cloud was awesomely frightening. Any idiot could see what evil the bombs we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima had unleashed. It was no secret that the bombs worked. It was no secret that they released deadly amounts of radiation that hurt everyone in the path of the wind.

Women were much more affected than men. Yet, we exploded more than 325 nukes in our country and in the Marshall Islands. That was many more than all the other countries in the world combined. This is bad shit. Aside from being the only country in the world to ever use a nuke, we were the country that seemed determined to expose our own citizens to the most amount of radiation. What is this? How can we live with ourselves? Who are we?

Yesterday I talked about trying to get some objectivity and perspective on personal situations. How about big national ones. When President Kennedy made his first moves toward nuclear detente, he had to do it in secret, behind the backs of Congress and the military. This was because it was a hated step. When he averted the nuclear threat in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was reviled for not using nukes! This is sick. The people of the US, I am certain would not have voted to start a nuclear war which could have wiped out a huge portion of two huge countries. Most normal people would never say "Oh yes, expose us to terrible effects from nuclear testing and we and our offspring will be happy to be sick for generations to come. Sounds OK to us."

And I can't abide the "We didn't know it was dangerous." argument. Bull. Just like the ridiculous notion that we smokers couldn't figure out that a couple of packs a day might give us problems after a while. No one is dumb enough not to figure that out. Reports were everywhere about the radiation poisoning in Japan. Why would our test bombs here be any different?

So the question is do we want to kill masses of our own citizens? Or who wants to kill masses of us? And then, why do we let them do it? In the case of the test sights, it was the military and the alphabet organizations (CIA< NSA<FBI) and the John Birchers and the very conservative big business influence and the anti-communists. The same people who somehow pushed through Agent Orange, Depleted Uranium, GMO crops, Aspertame. All agents of destruction of ourselves as much or more than of communism.

So, I will conclude once again that we seem to be the most willing people on the planet to sacrifice the health and well being of ourselves for the ideology or profit of our military and big business. It is down right medieval.

It seems that it is subversive for us to object to practices that most other countries halt. It is subversive to want to eliminate toxic and deadly exposure of masses of people. We need to evaluate carefully whom we listen to. John McCain and Dick Cheney would have given us many nuclear wars by now. Who will watch out for us if not we ourselves?