The past 100 years

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Dec. 27, 1917: Tomas Baca of Magdalena had a painful accident while cleaning his gun Sunday evening. The gun exploded and shot off his toe.

The wound was dressed and is healing satisfactorily.

Dec. 27, 1967: Neither patron nor “great educator,” the Office of Economic Opportunity acts primarily as an enabler, assisting the poor to choose their own opportunities in life, State OEO Director Father Robert Garcia said this morning.

“And in our role as enablers,” he told a graduate student seminar sponsored by the Santa Fe Council on International Relations, “we try to teach poor people that often they must pressure and push government so that perhaps they can change laws, make them more flexible, to include more people and solve more problems. We assist people to stand up and speak and encourage them to be heard in the centers of government.”

Dec. 27, 1992: For 50 years, nuclear weapons development was the primary mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau.

But today — a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union — the lab is under pressure to beat its swords into plowshares, or face the oblivion that swallowed America’s Cold War adversary.

The extent to which Los Alamos and the nation’s two other nuclear weapons research labs are turning from wartime to peacetime work has been the subject of a growing debate.

Critics say the research labs, which include Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, want to continue designing new nuclear weapons — despite the fact that all plans for new weapons have been canceled and no new orders have taken their place.