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Rocky Flats – Wild Life Refuge???

September 1, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train for August 24, 2018
By JUDITH MOHLING
Hot plutonium particles definitely are not cool.
They are to be avoided, although with past nuclear activities we all are at risk. As Kate Bush sings, “Chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung.”
Rocky Flats, on a windy plateau eight miles south of Boulder, was home to a plutonium pit factory. Every pit, the core of a nuclear weapon, in the US nuclear arsenal, was fabricated at the Rocky Flats plant over 40 years, from 1952 to 1989, totaling more than 70,000 pits. Each pit if fractured into breathable particles contains enough plutonium to harm the health of every person on earth. The area was “cleaned up,” after production was stopped, and declared “safe” by the EPA, the DOE and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. All admit that there is still an unknown quantity of plutonium dusting and buried at the site, and presumably their fingers are crossed that plutonium does not migrate.
But, it does—from burrowing animals bringing up tons of soil a year laced with plutonium, from wind, water, snow; any disturbance of the soil undoubtedly releases hot particles.
At least, let’s minimize risk of exposure and keep people, especially kids, away from Rocky Flats.
But wait! The US Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan that will maximize exposure to hot plutonium particles. They intend to open the site to the public for recreation, hiking and biking, for example, in three weeks, on September 15. Think of cyclists on a windy day—clouds of possibly radioactive dust swirling up from their tires. Or consider families sitting on the ground happily consuming a sticky picnic.
Strangely, given its invisible alpha particles, Rocky Flats is luxuriously beautiful—it has some of the last remaining tall grass prairie, undulating in the winds like an inland ocean; it is filled with wildlife—looking like a true haven for animals and humans. It is not.
There are signals of growing awareness. A “terrifyingly brilliant book,” “Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats,” by Kristen Iversen, is being read all over the world. In it Ms Iversen describes the institutionalized deceptions of the government at the plant throughout its tenure, and the deadly contamination. This may waken people to the dangers.
Also, the town of Superior, east of Rocky Flats, has a lawsuit asking for an injunction to stop the Fish and Wildlife Service from opening the Refuge until a careful, full environmental impact determination has been made—another indication of an awakening public.
Join the awakening and resist. Hot particles are not cool.
Come to a panel discussion: There Is No Refuge From Nuclear War or Nuclear Waste: Rocky Flats In Context, September 15, 7:00 PM at Naropa, 2130 Arapaho in Boulder.
And, join the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, www.rmpjc.org.

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Disarmament Quotes

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

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