Subject: Dr. Otto Raabe on Plutonium's hazards -- STOP CASSINI #108
Date: March 28th, 1999
Time Frame: There are only 88 days left until the last appropriate moment of redirection of the Cassini probe - the flyby of Venus, 7 weeks before the flyby of Earth.
Hi!
As mentioned a few issues ago, science does not exist in a vacuum. Sad to say, but truth does not exist in a vacuum either. Further explanations of everything are always in order. Final summations always leave out the details. And there is always a more correct way to say things. But truth is like a flower, and even an ugly truth is infinitely more beautiful than any lie.
Russell D. Hoffman, Founder and Editor
Today's Subjects:
The U.S. military is grabbing the high groud -- and the Earth below -- by building weapons in space. Militarily, it is the next logical step (if your objective is global domination). But at what cost? It is an environmental and human rights assault that make everything that has come before trivial by comparison. WWI, WWII, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hussein, the Taliban, ethnic cleansing -- all trivial in comparison.
As most readers of this newsletter surely know, Karl Grossman is Professor of Journalism, State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, author, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat To Our Planet, writer and narrator, TV Documentary: Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens and Nukes In Space 2: Unacceptable Risks. His presentation at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany and at Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, March 1999 has been transcribed and presented online. Here is the URL:
www.animatedsoftware.com\cassini\kg9903gs.htm
Highly recommended reading. It contains the facts which prove that there is a war going on that makes the Cold War seem positively tepid by comparison. I tend to look at the whole project through "history's eyes" -- considering hundreds of years, thousands even. Grossman digs out the facts from NOW that prove it's actually happening.
I've read about war all my life, why I don't know, I hate war, but found long ago, that I could read a good "war book" practically without putting it down. My own dad wrote one, from his WWII experiences, it became (of course) my personal favorite book about grunts. Having concentrated on tactics mainly until the last 15 years or so, when more or less suddenly, strategy became of more interest, but that led me to my heart's desire, the ultimate strategy, which is stopping wars in the first place. The real military boys see preventing war as the ONLY truly successful strategy. Those that cannot accept that truism are just adventurers and should not be charged with making the high-level decisions for protecting this country (or any other). They may be great fighters, but they are not great thinkers.
Strategically, anyone who has not read USAAF Major Alexander P. de Seversky's Victory Through Air Power, might want to pick up a copy. It covers the difference between having an air fleet and not having one. It applies in triplicate to the space around Earth. They want it because they need it. Of course, they think it will make war obsolete. They always think better weapons will make war obsolete. Sooner or later it might -- when they wipe out everyone! Somebody should write the book explaining why America wants all this control -- the reasons are "airtight".
If you got a chance to read my last newsletter you know I'm reading Mahan right now. What Victory Through Air Power is for the Air Force, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 is to the Navy, as amended, so to speak, by Seversky.
Now this is the thing: I think they (the Navy) control the whole show, by the way, not the Air Force or the Army, but the Navy. And not the president; he comes and goes. He can't just unscrew everything -- change a system gone mad -- no matter how hard he tries. Society forbids it, so the mil guys have nothing to worry about from mere politicians. They (A U.S. Navy Pr person, specifically) tell me that to change the world, you have to, you know, make the whole world know, then they put every conceivable obstacle in the way of my telling the world!
Yes, I believe the Navy is #1 among equals among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it is they who are the ACTIVE nuclear nuts. The Air Force has the RTGs, and those pesky and useless (because we dare not use them) nuclear weapons and such, but other than that, they have so far been barred from getting what they really want -- nuclear airplanes, (yes, they STILL dream of such things!) and manned weapons platforms in space.
In fact there are really two Navies in the United States, the Nuclear and the Non-Nuclear. One is relatively friendly to the natives (the U.S. citizens, that is) and open, and cooperates (more or less) with society. The other doesn't. It is the antithesis of what democracy wants, and being our warriors doesn't make their behavior tolerable. They have way outstepped their bounds.
The Air Force came into existence as though it were alive -- as though it had a life of its own that could not be denied forever, and Thank God too. As long as the Air Force operated as a "wing" of the Army as the USAAF, it was crippled, and had it not been released by/during WWII to make the strategic moves it needed to make, well, Uber Ales wouldn't be the only German spoken around here! (All this is not to say they did nearly as much ground strafing as they should have, and they made numerous other relatively small errors, but all in all, our strategic decisions regarding how to deploy our air power were very successful in WWII and ever since, as well.)
It's a good thing we knew what we were doing, because the Nazi's had a pretty good idea of how to use "3space" for effect -- Werner Von Braun (I presume) must have explained it to them early on. Those V2's could have really screwed things up for the Allies. Fortunately, Hitler was indeed a madman, so he did such things as assigning ME 262's, the greatest fighter of the war of course, to be BOMBERS, and he didn't believe in fighter planes much at all, really, and he barely realized you can't effectively bomb until you own the skies, and you can't own the skies without good fighters, and lots of them. You can't invade. You can't do anything. The Allies knew this, and we won. Spitfires saved England, and then P-51 Mustangs saved Europe. The destruction at Midway of the majority of the Japanese carriers sealed Japan's fate. And the fact that our carriers were by chance all out to sea during the Pearl Harbor attack allowed us to quickly mount an effective counterattack.
And the V2s? While admittedly there was an accuracy problem, nevertheless, if Hitler had used them for effect instead of to terrorize London (which only made the people have MORE resolve -- only that, and V2s killed perhaps 20,000 or so of the people in London and nearby towns as well) he would probably have had a much bigger bang for his buck. Lose the HMS Hood or something to a V2, and London would have been plenty terrified, and it would have actually done Hitler some good.
Anyway, the point is, the war really is up there. Has been since WWI, but it took 20 years and the start of another World War before even our own military men realized it. WWI would have been very different if either side had realized the power of the new tool that was available to them. For example, neither side would give their pilots parachutes during most of WW1. Why not? For fear that "cowards" would abandon perfectly good airplanes which actually could have been limped home! The military never does -- cannot -- realize the value of the individual. Meanwhile, the life expectancy of a tail gunner serving at the front during WW1 was all of six weeks. And indeed, even without a parachute, many a good pilot DID abondon their "perfectly good" airplane -- if it was on fire! Cowards? Realists. Helicopter pilots in Vietnam had a terrible time getting armor plating, even though it had been "approved" for use in the Huey's. Many didn't make it back, nor did the men on board their choppers, for lack of this protection, which is blamed more on bookwork than anything else.
Well, that's war, isn't it? Collateral damage occurs all over. The first "kills" by Apache helicopters in the Gulf War were -- two U.S. soldiers who were happilly hosed down by a pilot who KNEW he didn't have a good match on his coordinates. They were the last Apache-caused "friendly fire" casualties of the war. Attitude is everything.
If we don't own the high ground, who will? Of course no one should, but if we don't, who will? Perhaps that is why my main focus is on the medical disaster these weapons are. Because I've read quite a bit of military history, (admittedly, leaving Mahan out for so long was a serious defect in my education) and I don't know where else it can go but up there. Lasers don't get weakened by the atmosphere, all the power "in the world" (if you have nukes on board)... it's a great way to fight a war, if you ignore the environmental consequences to your own people and other "noncombatants". Karl Grossman wrote the book on it -- The Poison Conspiracy, only here, there is not even the pretence of society control on the environmental assaults -- the military boys see every one of these assaults as being "worth it" but of course, none of them are. We are dying down here, of cancer, leukemia and birth defects, as most "civilians" well know.
But here's the thing:
If the Air Force can get the power (juice, lasers, people, whatever) it wants up in space, they will wrest away control from the Navy! You see, the nuclear subs are the kings of the military world. And they are not the Air Force. The Air Force would like to be king, because after all, except for those subs, they are. (As you can read in Victory Through Air Power, written in 1929, I think.) The Air Force has long believed that it should be the ultimate military authority in America -- at least since around the time of Seversky's book, which finally explained it to Congress and everyone else.
Now, if anyone gets into space weapons it will of course be the USAF. And what I'm saying is, the real reason they want to do it, is simply because it is absolutely the next logical step, and strategically, they should have done it a long time ago, but above all that, it gives the ultimate authority in the all-important "the weapons they give me are bigger and more important than the weapons they give you" category!
But it gets worse:
Some kind of Star Wars should have been built in the 60's, and we should have shot down the first two Russian nuclear spy sats, and that would have been that. There wouldn't have been dozens of them, because the first ones would have been stopped. But they weren't. It was a "live and let live" attitude between the U.S. Military space boys and the Russian military space boys. Because both knew each was totally vulnerable. AS IT IS TODAY. The "Mars 98" probe Woody Smith talked about -- Mars 96, of course -- did you read what that guy said about it? NO RELEASE WHATSOEVER. That's absolutely unproven! Covering for Russia's crimes! Is that not the greater crime? To not only build this stuff, but to let the other guys build it too, so that we are absolutely guaranteed of a military standoff, cold, hot, or lukewarm, it's still a waste of trillions of dollars!
The real threat right now is not the U.S. policy alone, but the combined attack on the people of Earth by the many military forces who all just want to play their war games. (France, England, North Korea, India and who knows who else -- Pakistan, and on and on... China, but they vow not to use nuclear weapons first. Only second.) America is having the most fun with it, and the other nations are all doing it WITH THE TACIT PERMISSION of the U.S., who believe they are decades ahead and can indeed already control everything they "really need to" in a war. So they let the others in, and it's a deadly game.
It is a policy that drives us to war. While Grossman rightly attacks the U. S. policy as being utterly mad, perhaps the greater madness is that the U. S. Policy includes letting other nations do it too. The Cold War is a fraud. It isn't over, like we are being told. It's a filthy devil's dance around the hell fires of plutonium and uranium.
-rdh
Bert Ulrich
NASA Headquarters
Public Services Division (POS)
300 E St. SW Washington, DC 20546
Internet: bert.ulrich@hq.nasa.gov
March 15th, 1999
Dear Sir,
It is clear from reading:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/policies.html#NASA Website Privacy Statement
that NASA could not possibly incur any liability whatsoever by linking to my web site as a legitimate and separate voice of the opposition to the Cassini spacecraft and all other nuclear launches with greater than .001 Curies of plutonium or other radioactive materials.
The proper page to link to is:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm
Please notify me if this link is made. The many links from the site to NASA are permanent and the URL I am asking you to link to is likewise permanent. I'm sure my readers and visitors would appreciate it if you would make this link; that is, they would think it was fair. And perhaps best of all (for you), I would certainly be chagrined if it happens.
Thank you in advance for your attention in this matter.
Sincerely,
Russell Hoffman
Founder and Editor
STOP CASSINI Newsletter -- over 100 issues, editor quoted in Washington Post and many other places
Founder and Webmaster
STOP CASSINI Website -- one of the top 50 "Saturn" sites (by links) on the web
END OF OUTGOING EMAIL
No response has been received as of press time.
Jim Spellman, who sent us this, is the president of the California Space Redevelopment Council and NSS chapter head.
INCOMING EMAIL
From: WSpaceport@aol.com
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:52:00 EST
To: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
Subject: Fwd: Cassini Lecture At Griffith Observatory On March 29
Special Lecture at Griffith Observatory on Monday, March 29
THE CASSINI-HUYGENS EXPLORATION OF THE SATURN SYSTEM
Stephen J. Edberg
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Monday, March 29, 1999
Time: 7:30 p.m.
As the best-instrumented probe ever sent to another planet, Cassini-Huygens, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, will produce the most complete information about a planet system ever obtained. This information will bring us closer to understanding the following:
Cassini's mission is a four-year, close-up study of the Saturnian system. Chief among the scientific goals are the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, Saturn's rings, and several moons, including a thorough characterization of Titan, a large moon thought to resemble a frigid, primordial Earth.
On its way now, Cassini-Huygens consists of a Saturn orbiter and an atmospheric probe. The Cassini orbiter will study the whole of Saturn's system, using gravity assists from the large moon Titan to venture into different regions of Saturn-space. The Huygens probe will parachute down through Titan's atmosphere to land on the hidden surface of this mysterious world.
In this presentation the plans and methods for studying this intriguing system will be discussed.
Stephen J. Edberg has been an active amateur astronomer since 1966 and has worked professionally in the field since 1970. Since 1986 he has worked on the Comet Rendezvous/Asteroid Flyby, Cassini, and Galileo projects. He is presently an Investigation and Discipline Scientist and the Outreach Team Leader on the Cassini Program. He has been honored by the International Astronomical Union with the naming of a minor planet, 3672 Stevedberg and has received a NASA Exceptional Service Medal and JPL Award for Excellence.
Admission: $2 for FOTO members, $5 for non-members, tickets available at the door (Children under 5 not admitted).
*****************************************************
Griffith Observatory Griffith phone: (323) 664-1181
2800 East Observatory Road Griffith fax: (323) 663-4323
Los Angeles, California 90027 USA http://www.GriffithObs.org
mailto:list@GriffithObs.org
END OF INCOMING EMAIL
It's pretty obvious that there will be no discussion of the dangers to the public of such "research" nor will the military connection spoken of in the first item in this newsletter be referred to. However, we still suggest that all who can make it attend the meeting and regret this late notice. At least it's still before the event!
At 03:02 PM 3/5/99 -0000, TM wrote:
Re: THE PROBE THAT FELL TO EARTH
Hi Russell Hoffman,
http://www.newscientist.co.uk/ns/19990306/contents.html
Refers to an article in this weeks New Scientist magazine which is published in the UK. Unfortunately it is not on their Website.
I think you can get the magazine "over there".
The article is about a 1996 Russian Mars Probe that failed and involved a plutonium re-entry event in or very near Chile (they can't / won't find it).
Very good article.
Regards,
TM
END OF INCOMING EMAIL
MY RESPONSE
Hi!
I had been looking for that article. James Oberg wrote it a few weeks ago and I had given him some input (wanted or not!). I subscribe to NS, so I guess it will be in my next issue.
NASA's Woody Smith (if he exists!) was quoted as saying the Russian containment on the "MARS '98" probe worked perfectly. (There was no "Mars '98 probe, but that's beside the point!)
I think Woody Smith is a commie sympathizer! (But, like Woody himself, they don't exist (anymore), do they?!
Thanks for sending me the info!
Sincerely,
Russell Hoffman
END OF RESPONSE
Note: The article indicates nothing's been found from Mars '96, but everyone in the article trusts the Russians to have built a "perfect" system! My my! It does note Dr. Otto Raabe admitting the following:
"For all practical purposes, the primary hazard from plutonium-238 dioxide occurs if it is somehow pulverized into very tiny particles -- smaller than 5 micrometers in diameter -- that are inhaled."
That is EXACTLY what Cassini will create in a flyby reentry accident, but not by pulverization, rather, by vaporization/incineration/burning. Yet for Cassini, this same scoundrel assured the public in nationally published letters in USA today, on Fox television and elsewhere, that even a full release of the plutonium in a flyby accident would be virtually inconsequential to the public! He should make up his mind or shut up his mouth.
"What's going to happen when whole countries drop off the radar screen with no infrastructure remaining?" -- Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah), Chair of the Senate Y2k Committee, addressing the first White House Y2K Council Summit, December 3, 1998
"The Titanic sank in an ocean that was 99% free of icebergs." -- Y2K embedded systems expert Mark Frautschi www.tmn.com/y2k
SIGN THE PETITION!
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/petition/cass1999.htm
CANCEL CASSINI by JUNE 24th, 1999!!!!
To Cancel Cassini start by asking NASA for the 1995 Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission and all subsequent related documents (on paper, please!). Tell them you need it IMMEDIATELY (members of the world press should do this too). All citizens of the world are ENTITLED to these documents because of the global threat Cassini poses. Here's where to get information:
Tell them Russell Hoffman, founder and editor of the STOP CASSINI newsletter, sent you. I bet they love to hear that!
NASA states that they do not have the resources anymore to answer most emails they receive. Liars! They have $13 billion dollars to play with. They can answer the public's questions. At least, ask them one specific question: How many letters did they get opposing Cassini today? (And tell them you oppose it too!) If each reader asks them that...
Here's NASA's email address:
Daniel Goldin is the head of NASA. Here's his email address: daniel.goldin@hq.nasa.gov
Here's the NASA URL to find additional addresses to submit written questions to:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-002-HQ.html
(Note that it looks like possibly a temporary URL assignment, but you can always start at http://www.nasa.gov.)
They imply at the web site that written comments are more likely to get answered -- quicker than emailed comments! Someone should welcome them to the 1990's before it's too late.
Long time readers know lots of questions to ask them! Ask them why they don't link to our web site. Ask them why they haven't got rid of Daniel Goldin, the glassy-eyed fool. Ask them why they haven't sent you YOUR copy of the 1995 EIS for the Cassini mission! Ask them anything, but demand an answer! YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW WHAT NASA IS DOING TO YOUR HEALTH.
Be sure to "cc" the president and VP and your senators and congresspeople, too.
president@whitehouse.gov vice-president@whitehouse.gov
Always include your full name and postal address in all correspondence to any Government official of any country.
Please send any news directly to the editor at the email address given below.
Please post these newsletters EVERYWHERE! You can -- and should -- send them to news media too! Please tell your friends and neighbors and Internet buddies to subscribe! These words can have power, but only if they are passed on to many others!
Thanks for reading,
Sincerely,
Russell D. Hoffman
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
Founder & Editor
STOP CASSINI Newsletter -- nearly 100 issues of mirth, merriment, and mind-numbingly depressing facts about NASA and other horrors
Webmaster
STOP CASSINI Web Site
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm
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Amendment One... "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble..."
Written in U.S.A.
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