Nuclear pits put us at risk

Aug. 6 and 9 was the 73rd anniversary of the USA bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mayor Matsui of Hiroshima said, “Certain countries are blatantly proclaiming self-centered nationalism and modernizing their nuclear arsenals, rekindling tensions that had eased with the end of the Cold War.”

On Aug. 7, I visited Los Alamos’ Bradbury Science Museum. A quote by the respected World War ll general and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower was posted on a wall: “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 not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

On Aug. 10, CBS aired “Whistleblower” with interviews of two former police chiefs who discussed numerous mismanagement and security lapses at the Los Alamos (National) Labs in 2002.

Now, with sufficient plutonium pits already in the U.S. arsenal, and a history of Colorado’s Rocky Flats being closed by the FBI due to safety violations of plutonium pits in 1989, Los Alamos Labs will be a site for more plutonium pits. This needless nuclear arsenal will cost billions of taxpayers’ money and put residents of Northern New Mexico at risk of possible nuclear accidents.

JEAN STEVENS Ranchos de Taos