Hiroshima 広島市 Day Again (may we have many)

Last year at this time I wrote about the “MAD“ness of nuclear arma­ments. In essence:

There does not seem to be much value in hav­ing nuclear weapons.

They may exist for a MAD (Mutu­ally Assured Destruc­tion) pur­pose. And yet, many peo­ple tell me that Israel’s ene­mies don’t care about MAD, because they (as well as dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist Chris­tians) believe that they will be in “a bet­ter place” after the destruc­tion. For those of us who believe that it is this world that counts, our task is to avoid such a destruc­tion. And then there’s the argu­ment from deter­rence. If Israel’s ene­mies are “MAD” enough to risk such destruc­tion, then, there is no deter­rent value in any nuclear weapon.

I’m not a par­tic­u­larly gullible per­son. In the early 1980s I worked with Yitz Green­berg. He would often refer to Elie Wiesel’s account in Night. Green­berg would bow his head, almost close his eyes and in a near whis­per, say that at one point dur­ing the Sho’a babies were tossed live into the cre­ma­to­ria in order to save the (approx­i­mately) 2¢ it would have cost to gas them first. Faced with accounts like this, I tell peo­ple that I can believe anything.

Once I under­stood that I could believe that any­thing is pos­si­ble, I real­ized that I should be able to attempt to imag­ine the impos­si­ble (or at least the “highly unlikely”), as a form of exer­cise, to pre­pare myself.

Some­time since 1967 or so I con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­ity of dis­play­ing an ambigu­ously non-existent nuclear device in the Kotel plaza. Think of the var­i­ous state­ments that makes.

Con­sider also the like­li­hood of a nuclear attack by one of Israel’s nuclear-armed ene­mies. Unless, of course they are com­pletely MAD, in which case noth­ing we might do would have any affect on their actions, why would any coun­try that wants to destroy Israel with a nuclear device also be will­ing to:

• Destroy the entire Pales­tin­ian Arab population
• Destroy the holy city of Jerusalem (Al Kuds with its mosque and shrine)?

We can assume that a mod­ern nuclear device (i.e. sig­nif­i­cantly larger than “Lit­tle Boy”), even if dropped on Tel Aviv, would destroy much of the sur­round­ing area and make it unin­hab­it­able for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time.

What does any­one gain?

unin­hab­it­able for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time

How long a time is “significant”?

Our fam­ily has in per­sonal (though dis­tant) inter­est in Cher­nobyl (or as translit­er­ated from the Ukrain­ian: Chornobyl).

My pater­nal grand­fa­ther (and his father before him) was born in Cherni­hiv (or as we learned to pro­nounce it: Chernigov). Both Cher­nobyl and Chernigov are in what seem to be two lovely, agri­cul­tur­ally fer­tile river val­leys. The two cities are less than 50 miles away from each other (as the crow flies, over two sets of hills/mountains with a third river val­ley in between).

An arti­cle that appeared at tree­hug­ger (That’s an unashamed name!) on August 4, 2010 shared an inter­est­ing report. Nearly 25 years have passed since the “acci­dent” of 1986. Since then, an area of nearly 200 square miles, “the Cher­nobyl exclu­sion zone” was iso­lated because of the nuclear dis­as­ter occurred. That area has been nearly free of human con­tact. No humans have been “poach­ing”. Nonethe­less, ani­mals still strug­gle to sur­vive there.

I have heard that cur­rent nuclear power-plant safe­guards are far bet­ter than they were in the mid 1980s. Yet, when­ever I do a Google search for some com­bi­na­tion of these three or four words:

• nuclear
• power
• civil­ian
• safe­guards

I come up with sites that deal with Pak­istan, Iran, Israel, or India but not the civil­ian nuclear power plant indus­try the Wikipedia arti­cle for which is exten­sive. How­ever, the arti­cle pri­mar­ily lists the major acci­dents, not what kinds of safe­guards have devel­oped. It is hard to know how safe any of these reac­tors are. In fact only on August 1, 2010, it seems, at least one drone crashed into the Bushehr reac­tor in Iran.

not san­guine

We were told that the kind of “acci­dent” we have expe­ri­enced this past sum­mer of 2010 in the Gulf of Mex­ico with the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill was highly unlikely. But that’s the way it is with accidents.

In Daniel Gilbert’s review of the recent book BEING WRONG, Adven­tures in the Mar­gin of Error by Kathryn Schulz, he presents the ques­tion: “why we don’t know we are mak­ing [errors]?” Indeed. And, when it comes to “unin­hab­it­able for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time”, I’d rather be safe than sorry.

so what should we use for energy?

Of course, none of what I’ve writ­ten above answers the big ques­tion of how we con­tinue. I’ve also read that wind and solar col­lec­tion farms are nowhere near the scale we would need to power our cur­rent uses.

I don’t, yet, have an answer for that question.

The fol­low­ing but­ton dates from the 1980s. It may be Isareli made, though in its man­u­fac­ture, and the clumsy style of its Hebrew let­ter­ing, it appears Amer­i­can made. It matches Amer­i­can, English-language ver­sions that date from the same period. The text trans­lates as “Nuclear Power? No Thanks”.

Date:	1980s
Size:	3.81
Pin Form:	straight clasp
Print Method:	cel­lu­loid
Text	כֹח-גרעיני? לֹא-תודה

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jacket you no longer wear, or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lay­ing around that you do not feel emo­tion­ally attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. At some point they will all go to an appro­pri­ate museum. You can see all the but­tons shared to date.