STOP CASSINI Newsletter #228 -- November 19th, 1999

Copyright (c) 1999

STOP CASSINI Newsletters Index
To: Subscribers, government officials, members of the press
From: Russell David Hoffman (still feisty after all these years)
Re: The world has had enough: STOP CASSINI #228
Date: November 19th, 1999

This issue's subjects:


(1) Bennett followup on EP resolution (with commentary by Paul Swann):


----- NEWS ITEM POSTED ON YAHOO (FORWARDED BY NHNE): -----


http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/991118/bi5.html

Thursday November 18, 9:00 pm Eastern Time

U.S. Senate panel chief blasts Europe Y2K vote

WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The chairman of a special Senate panel on the Year 2000 blasted as ill-informed a European Parliament call Thursday to shut down nuclear weapon alert systems over the New Year to avoid accidental launches.

``This vote is particularly troubling in that it demonstrates an overall lack of awareness with regard to Y2K's potential effects on a country's infrastructure,'' Sen. Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, said in a statement.

He said the European move also showed ``a profound misunderstanding of Y2K's potential effects on ballistic missile systems.''

Deputies in Strasbourg voted to appeal to the United States and Russia in particular to guard against possible errors in computer systems that may not recognize the date change to 2000.

U.S. and Russian military officials are to spend New Year's Eve together in a special command center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to monitor launch data across the century date change.

Bennett -- who was involved in setting up the U.S.-Russian Center for Year 2000 Strategic Stability -- said shutting down missile warning systems would be ``far more dangerous than any problem that may arise from Y2K.''
``What the European Parliament is asking countries to do is wear blindfolds during the crucial date rollover,'' he said.

The so-called Y2K glitch could cause some computers and the systems they control to crash or malfunction when their internal clocks encounter ``00'' in areas that track dates.

Bennett said there was no danger of missiles being launched by a computer glitch because a person always is part of the command process.

``International cooperation and awareness are the keys to avoiding a Y2K catastrophe, not pulling the plug and hoping for the best,'' he said.

The European Parliament also voted to ask countries with nuclear power stations to shut them down over New Year's Eve unless they had been shown to be millennium compliant.

Deputies said their appeal would be aimed specifically at countries in central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia and members of the former Soviet Union.

----- END OF NEWS ITEM -----


----- COMMENTS BY PAUL SWANN POSTED ON Y2K-NUCLEAR FORUM: -----


A crass response to the Euro Parliament resolution from Sen. Robert
Bennett, chairman of the Senate special committee on theYear 2000.

If anyone can find where the resolution calls for "shutting down missile
warning systems", thus "asking countries to wear blindfolds during the
crucial date rollover," as Bennett claims it does, please let me know. Or
does the Senator - who was involved in setting up the U.S.-Russian Center
for Year 2000 Strategic Stability - not understand what de-alerting nuclear
weapons means?

Paul

----- END OF PAUL SWANN'S COMMENTS -----



(2) Aliens, Science, and another nutty NASA historian -- Alex Roland:


CNN is run by aliens, I think.  Certainly it is not run by upstanding American citizens acting as fair and balanced reporters!  Nor is NASA run by upstanding American citizens, although the historical record will undoubtedly be falsely made to show otherwise. -- rdh

----- INCOMING EMAIL FORWARDED BY LARRY KLAES: -----


Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 11:36:32 -0500
To: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
From: Larry Klaes <lklaes@bbn.com>
Subject: Not so boldly going forth

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/future/

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/specials/9911/future.outlook/content/space/

---

Not so boldly going forth

"...If we find any traces of life in the universe, we could see another
conceptual revolution in the way we think about ourselves and our place in
the universe."

-- Alex Roland, historian

Will humankind ever travel to the galaxies of distant stars? Alex Roland
thinks so. But the former NASA historian and History Department chair at
Duke University believes space travel and exploration will come into its own
only after some significant technological breakthroughs -- and when such
travel and exploration becomes lucrative.

On the future on space travel in the next century:

For the next 20 to 30 years, I'm quite sure we're going to see no difference
whatsoever. We're going to have more of what we've had for the last 30 to 40
years, which is, at considerable risk and great expense, sending humans up
into low orbit -- [who] float around and look busy and come back to Earth --
and not really accomplishing very much. And it will continue to be the case
during this period of the next 20 to 30 years that automated spacecraft will
perform the most useful functions in space, and make the most important
discoveries.

[One thing that could] change that, sometime in the next century, is ... a
dramatic technological breakthrough in launch vehicle development, which
will allow us to get off the surface of the Earth much more efficiently and
much more safely than we can now. And once we can put people and more
supplies and equipment and cargo in Earth orbit more effectively than we do
now, then that will open up space in a way that's simply not available to us
now.

One other set of activities might make that happen even without a
technological breakthrough -- "war" and "commerce." If we discovered a
large-scale commercial enterprise in space that paid for itself -- then we
might see large-scale space activity, and humans could go into space as part
of the infrastructure. [Or if we see something like the Star Wars defense
system that] was proposed in the 1980s. If we had put up the huge
infrastructure envisaged for Star Wars, people would have gone along to
operate and maintain the equipment at a fraction of the total cost of the
enterprise. But I don't see either of those happening very soon -- either a
military or a commercial activity large enough to justify and support
large-scale human activity.

On whether the space technologies imagined by popular culture, such as
light-speed travel, will be possible:

We don't know any technology now that can make those happen, nor can we
foresee any technological trajectory that currently is within our grasp that
will lead to those capabilities, because we just don't know how to do them.
Until we get that technological breakthrough, it's impossible to predict
when they're going to happen, or even if they're going to happen.

On discovering life elsewhere in the universe:

I expect eventually we'll find life out in the universe someplace. Whether
it will be intelligent life is impossible to predict, and whether it will
still be existent is impossible to predict. That is, I think it's possible
to imagine life emerging on other bodies out in space, and running through
its cycle, and going extinct. In fact, you would expect on the law of
averages that we would discover eventually life at all different stages of
evolution, just as space travelers from other places might have discovered
Earth at different times in the past, and found life at a very different
stage of evolution than it is now.

On what today represents the future of space technology:

I would expect it's probably nano-technology. That is, attempts to build
computers and machines at virtually the atomic level, so that a very small
package can prove to be a very powerful instrument in space -- not just a
passive scientific instrument receiving information, but an actual machine
that can do work out in space. And if that technology proceeds in the way it
now seems to, we will be able to send very powerful instruments very long
distances at very high rates of speed. Also, we can put very, very powerful
instruments up into low Earth orbit at very slight cost. That has enormous
commercial implications.

Alex Roland

Alex Roland is professor of history and chairman of the Department of
History at Duke University in North Carolina, where he teaches military
history and the history of technology. From 1973 to 1981 he was a historian
with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Among his books are:
"Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail" (1978); "Model Research: The
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915-1958" (1985); "A
Spacefaring People: Perspectives on Early Spaceflight" (editor, 1985); and
"Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western
Society" (with Richard Preston and Sidney Wise; 5th edition, 1991). His
principal area of research and teaching is the evolution of military
technology in Western civilization. He has written and lectured widely in
criticism of the United States manned space flight program. He is past
president of the Society for the History of Technology and of the U.S.
National Committee of the International Union for the History and Philosophy
of Science.

----- END OF EMAIL FORWARDED BY LARRY KLAES -----


----- MY RESPONSE: -----


Re: Not so boldly going forth --WHAT is wrong with NASA historians [and ex-historians]?

Hi Larry!

Thanks for the email (shown below) and all your many other wonderful forwarded items.

It's such a shame that someone such as Alex Roland, who (as shown in the bio he included) has such wonderful training in topics I'm fascinated by myself, is so misguided about such relatively simple matters as indicated herein. I wonder what his views on Cassini are? (I hate to think!)

Regarding life in other galaxies, first you have to get there.  Assuming you can manage to gain enough speed to make such travel possible without consuming all of the available energy on Earth for the next zillion years while doing it, if you travel near the speed of light you can't run into anything, but there's a lot of stuff out there.  At those speeds a millionth of a grain of sand is as a boulder the size of the rock of Gibraltar to hit, but still just a millionth of a grain of sand to see. 

And steering is undoubtedly rather difficult as well, since turning consumes energy.  And considering how inaccurate navigation is, even in relatively simple solar system exploration, one can imagine you would have a lot of trouble getting properly aimed, until several orders of magnitude better accuracy than is now achievable is obtained -- say, 5 or 6 orders.  If you go 50 light-years away from here in a blink of an eye, but end up half a light year away from your target at the other end, you might just as well have stayed home.  You'll never get to your target.

And then there's the problem of slowing down.

That is why the milky way and all the galaxies might as well be oil paintings.  I'm all for studying them with radios and telescopes, but hate to see time and especially public funds wasted on ways of getting there.

Some people ponder about wormholes, and jumps to light speed, and warp speed, and transporter rooms (ghastly things which disintegrate people.  Sure, a copy is built at the other end, but the person in the transporter room is utterly, totally dead).  But all these things are mathematical extrapolations or simplistic science fiction fantasies with no basis in anything a truly scientific community should care to spend time or money working on.

A real scientific community tries to take the next step well.

Each generation, each experimenter, has a place in a long line of scientific discovery.  It is usually not their choice, what that place would be -- yet there it is, a small step to be made, which they are in a time and place to make (and sometimes they get a Nobel Prize for what many of them admit were small steps taken on the shoulders of giants).

So what a truly scientific community tries to do is to take the next steps well.  The steps that come up in their tenure of work.  Those are what Alex Roland should be concerning himself with, not something that might happen if 500 steps ahead of current technological achievement, the forces of nature are all proven screwy, and strange things can happen that as far as we know right now are impossible!

Intergalactic travel is not just impossible in our lifetimes, but in the next 10,000 lifetimes.  We aren't going anywhere and we aren't being visited.  So we had better learn how to take care of this planet instead.

Alex Roland wonders lamely about whether alien visitors have been here before, but ponder this:  What visitors would leave the blue jewel of the heavens alone once they had found it?

No one -- not anyone on any planet, in any galaxy, would drop by Earth, only to say, "Oh what a lovely place!  Let's leave it alone for several eons while we look at more dead moons all over the place, and look at exploding stars of various sorts, which we can't get near because they're too hot."  Or did our intrepid travelers manage to beat that too?  Do they eat?  "I'm hungry, are you?  Let's go, there's nothing to eat here but carbon-based lifeforms and their byproducts."

That's silly and unscientific.  No one would visit Earth and then leave it.

Ergo, belief in past alien visitors is as silly as not believing in the evidence of evolution.  (Which has nothing to do with what God may or may not have done as well, which by definition is invisible to science anyway.  So not only is science free to discover whatever it may about the world, but its discoveries will always remain faithful to the same underlying universal principals, whatever they turn out to be.)

Thanks again for showing me this sad commentary on the "alien sub-culture" as NASA.  It's sad that someone like this writes the history books for NASA.

If this guy ever understood his real role in society, it would be a conceptual revolution indeed!

Sincerely,

Russell Hoffman
...Still looking for intelligent life in the universe...

----- END OF MY RESPONSE -----



(3) Jeff Nyquist demands better "proof" -- live test scheduled for 1/1/2000?:


Long-time readers of this newsletter know that Jeff Nyquist, writer for World Net Daily, has been previously engaged in some written debates with this author.  Nyquist lost the debates, choosing to not to make corrections to even his most ludicrous assertions, and failing to correct anything I might have accidentally or unknowingly misrepresented.  Nevertheless, I sent him the following letter:

----- OUTGOING EMAIL TO JEFF NYQUIST, WORLD NET DAILY: -----


To: Jeff Nyquist
From: Russell Hoffman
Re: Your previous letters to me
Date: November 15th, 1999

Dear Mr. Nyquist;

I demand a retraction from you.

These quotes shown below are from a Copley News Service article by Stephen Green titled "Threat of electromagnetic war has long worried U.S. military leaders". 

The article makes undeniably clear the veracity of the things I wrote about the effects of a nuclear EMP and its expected use in a nuclear war.  These are the very things you denied in your silly and childish letters to me of a few months ago.  And you claimed to have good authority for your comments, too!

You are without question either one of the biggest liars and scoundrels I have ever come across, or a complete idiot.  Frankly, I couldn't care which it is, but I think in any case, you should stop misleading your readers.

Sincerely,

Russell Hoffman
Peace Activist
Carlsbad, CA

===== CLIPS FROM SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13TH, 1999, PAGES A-21 AND A-26: =====

...Rep. Curt Weldon, P-Pa., chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, said an electromagnetic assault could put "the United States in a giant time machine and, in the blink of an eye, transform your high-tech society into a preindustrial one, circa the 19th century."...

Nuclear strategies commonly call for an attack to begin with a high-in-the-sky thermonuclear explosion aimed at knocking out command and control systems with an electromagnetic pulse.

"In all of the (strategic) war games in which I have been present and all of the ones, which I've studied... the attack... always begins with an EMP laydown... by a multiple-megaton high altitude burst" said Lowell Wood, a nuclear warfare expert and technical consultant to the House Armed Service Committee.

===== END OF CLIPS FROM SD U-T ARTICLE =====

----- END OF OUTGOING EMAIL -----


----- JEFF NYQUIST'S RESPONSE: -----


To: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: Re: Copley news service article confirms many of my main points...

    I am well aware that a nuclear war begins with a precursor EMP
attack.  I have written about this extensively myself.  What I question
is your assertion that an EMP attack would cause nuclear plants to melt
down.  That I have no evidence of, nor have seen any proof of, even from
you.

    JRN

----- END OF JEFF NYQUIST'S RESPONSE -----


----- MY RESPONSE: -----

Dear Jeff Nyquist:

Thank you for your email (shown above) clarifying some of our points of disagreement.

But let me see if I've got this straight:

You can admit that cars, trucks, trains, busses, airplanes, chemical factories, advanced medical instrumentation, home computers, PDAs, watches, pacemakers, Mr. Coffee, radio stations, television stations, cable T.V. systems, television sets, radios, VCRs, Walkmans, city water filtration equipment, motors, pumps, electronic controllers, laser pointers, scanners, printers, fax machines, clocks, thermostats, oscilloscopes, satellites (not "hardened" ones, of course, although there is debate that the hardening was done effectively), 911 phone systems, cell phone systems, cell phones, regular twisted-pair phone systems, DSL, ISDN, T1 lines, breadmakers, dishwashers, theater sound systems, electric guitars, amplifiers, organs, microphones (drum kits will survive), electronic locks, motion detectors, security cameras, cash registers, bank computers (better watch your assets!), factory automation systems, the electronic keyboard I typed this on, and everyone's Nintendo Play Station, would all have their electronics permanently fried, but yet you somehow think that nuclear power plants are amazingly different, despite being made up of nothing more than thousands of off-the shelf commercially available non-EMP-hardened electronics and electro-mechanical parts, pipes, pumps and vessels?

If you think the particular configuration that makes these parts (and a whole lot of poison) function as a nuclear power plant makes them somehow impervious to the widespread, powerful, and virtually instantaneous effects of a nuclear EMP, well, I'm sorry you need even more "proof".  If you think a loss of all the electronic equipment at a nuclear power plant is not a problem, rather than being just about the worse recipe for a meltdown there can be (check your manuals or ask your friends), then it is clear that you demand one thing, and I would be happy to give it to you, but unfortunately I'm not allowed to conduct live demonstrations on full-scale operational models of nuclear power plants, and of course the results of any military tests that might have been done, no matter how obvious the answers are, are "classified", so further proof is simply not available.  You'll have to live in the dark, but I'm sure you know it's true, just as well as I do, and so this asking for "proof" is just a charade.

But I'm glad to see we agree that an EMP is the most likely first strike of a nuclear war.  I've presented clear evidence from government reports which indicate that a nuclear EMP would destroy American civilization in the blink of an eye.  It baffles me that you wish to pretend that amongst all this rubble of our once-great society would stand these fortress-like nuclear power plants, nuclear spent fuel pools, nuclear reprocessing facilities, and nuclear waste dumps and transport casks.

Despite any hell that might break out around them, you proclaim these things, the most dangerous and deadly things on Earth, to be safe against all possible acts of God or man.   You live in a dangerous dream-world.

I wonder what would you have said to Galileo when he told the world that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and let people look through his telescope and study the math?  Clearly, you would have said that you needed more proof!

Jeff, your position is untenable.  What really does you in is that I am right, regardless of whether you will openly agree with me or not, or whether the government can hide all the research or not.  This is a huge and eminent danger to the world and admitting it is the first step towards fixing it -- and it CAN be fixed.

But instead, you deny it, claiming there are 22 nukes in Yugoslavia, which you further stated were being attacked by our own troops (would they really be so stupid?  God forbid!) with non-nuclear pea-shooter EMP weapons of extremely limited capabilities -- THAT was your entire answer to my claims -- hogwash is all you have offered!  Truly, the matter doesn't deserve further discussion other than to hear it retracted from the source (you) and the obvious facts and truths of the matter be openly discussed by one and all.  (And in particular, by you in your future articles and letters to me.)  If you have "proof" to the contrary, then by all means present it.  But you don't because you can't!

The fact of the matter is, nuclear power plants need constant electricity in numerous and varied levels and forms to operate, from the lowest-wattage NAND gate inside the door-locks to the most modern video display terminals in the control rooms.  Nuclear power plants run on the same juice the rest of America runs on, and they are just as vulnerable to the effects of an Electromagnetic Pulse.  To think otherwise is a very dangerous breed of madness.  Furthermore the communications systems with experts and even with plant employees could and would be disrupted by a nuclear EMP.  They would not only not know when to come to work, they would not have transportation to and from work!  Cars and public transportation systems would all have failed as well as phones and the Internet.  So if anything goes wrong at a nuclear plant or reprocessing facility or spent fuel dump or whatever, who are you going to call after a nationwide shutdown from a nuclear EMP?  No one, that's who.  You'll call on God, but he'll be very busy at the time.  It's better to prepare properly for possible problems, than to be obliterated by people who won't even admit that what they are doing is wrong, deny the full dangers we face, and seek to destroy the truth by hiding it in a thousand half-truths!

The nuclear quagmire we are in is a mess that could have been avoided, and can still be reduced significantly if positive actions are taken immediately.

There are many better choices for America.  Non-nuclear, renewable, high-tech, cost-effective, environmentally sensitive, choices that do not entail a millionth of the threat to society that the nuclear fuel cycle poses, not just because of the EMP dangers but especially because of the EMP dangers.

I have studied the many alternatives, and you can too.

But in 43 days, nuclear power is about to cross a watershed moment of truth -- Y2K.  Even a fully compliant nuclear plant might have a non-y2K related problem.  But Y2K might mean that plant will also have to contend with constant or sporadic power grid failures, phone line and Internet communications problems, internal computer problems which squeezed past the $100,000,000,000.00 invested in fixing and testing Y2K bugs, not to mention the possibility of local riots, or other strife, keeping most or all of the staff at home. Y2K is coming, whatever it is.  However bad it is.  Normally States expect immediate Federal help if they have a nuclear emergency.  Yet states have ALREADY been told that they should NOT expect immediate Federal assistance around Y2K (it is amazing that statement has not caused the cancelation of government-planned Y2K parties, considering the liability issues it presents).

Why can't the nuclear power plants shut down for at least a little while, perhaps 10 days, from December 28th until January 8th or so?  Some major gas pipelines are voluntarily shutting down for the millennium crossover, yet their risk is far lower than the risk from nuclear facilities.  Some large chemical plants are also going to be closed, and yet even their risk is far lower than the risk from the various nuclear facilities.

Yet stubbornly, the nuclear industry refuses to shut down for the crossover.

Is it because they are on their last legs already, financially?  I don't think that's it at all! (Even though they are.)  It's because they have never faced a problem like this, and they have never faced a problem they could understand the full potential of anyway.  Every nuke operator in the world believes they will NOT be responsible for "the big one".  But we've come so close, it's inevitable sooner or later, one of them will make a human error, or a string of human errors will occur, or there will be combinations of natural and human things that cause a catastrophe.  You just can't keep playing with this stuff day in and day out, and not have things go wrong eventually.  Y2K presents certain events which are now expected, such as scattered power outages, and who-knows-what-else.  These events were supposed to be rare events in designing the risk assessments for nuclear power plants, but Y2K has made many of them practically inevitabilities.

Yet still the Industry won't "blink".  Why not?  No one person is responsible for the Y2K dangers we all face, INCLUDING the possibility of a nuclear EMP, if even a "small" nuclear war (such as you envision) occurs.  No one person is to blame for the peril this planet now faces.  The nuclear industry needs to react, BEFORE the button is pushed.  BEFORE the lights go out.  BEFORE the riots, the computer viruses, the strife -- whatever is coming, we don't need another problem -- melting down nukes -- piled in on top of everything.  Why can't the nuclear industry accept that this problem is way bigger than they are?

If they shut down voluntarily, perhaps the world will let them open again after Y2K.  Depending on what happens.  But if they don't shut down -- if they go into Y2K running full-blast and as always, on the brink of disaster, then if anything goes wrong, the entire industry will be destroyed by the anger and disapproval of the people, which grows every day anyway because of Tokaimura and Aldermaston and Paducah and Yucca Valley and Beatty Nevada and a thousand other lies which make our blood boil.

So no, I don't think the public will take kindly to a meltdown or two on Y2K.  Let alone a hundred caused by a nuclear EMP burst above the country.  Those who survive will wonder how it ever got this crazy.  It's because the truth got away from us.  Reality bites, while dreams only threaten, or warn.

Why can't the nuclear industry prove itself cautious to the point of shutting itself down before Y2K -- NOW to be specific, because every hour, even every minute they are shut down they cool somewhat, and that cooling lengthens the amount of time it takes for things to go from bad to worse, when things go wrong at all.  And things can and do go wrong.  Have you heard about Aldermaston's litany of problems this year alone, over in England?  How about Tokaimura?  Jack Shannon has stated that an accident such as happened in Japan could happen here as well, because the containers are not "geometry-safe".

A few months ago, a space probe called Cassini passed a "moment of truth" for us all.  You might recall it.  It had 72.3 pounds of plutonium dioxide (mostly Pu 238) in vaporizable form on board.  That's 400,000 Curies -- hundreds of billions of "potentially lethal doses".

After the flyby, some people proclaimed the anti-Cassini folk had been "proven" wrong by the success.  They loudly proclaimed that one success somehow proved that "one on one million" wasn't really, say, "one in one hundred" or "one in one thousand" or some other unacceptably high risk.  But about a month later, NASA lost a space probe called Mars Climate Orbiter, doing a maneuver that was very similar to the Cassini flyby.  The full data on the failure is now in and everyone, from top to bottom, is calling NASA, JPL, and Lockheed-Martin fools for the MCO failure.

And although no one will talk about the similarities between a Cassini flyby and a Mars Climate Orbiter insertion, the fact of the matter is that the entire world knows NASA could just as easily have doused us with a plutonium shower of unimaginable magnitude.  And NASA has admitted that their first thoughts when they learned that MCO had failed were "could this have been Cassini?".  And the answer is a resounding YES.  The error propagated through NASA, JPL, and Lockheed Martin, and went unnoticed and uncorrected for months. It was Murphy in full swing.  It could have happened to Cassini alright.  It could have happened to anybody.  It is the COST OF FAILURE which needs to be considered.  MCO cost next to nothing ($125,000,000.00).  Cassini would have been a catastrophe financially (it cost about 60 times what MCO cost) and from a health standpoint (although some people, without any scientific justification whatsoever, deny the health dangers for some Cassini accident scenarios).

The COST OF FAILURE at the nuclear power plants, nuclear reprocessing plants, spent fuel pools, and nuclear waste recycling and storage facilities is extremely high.

It is one thing to lose a probe somewhere out by Mars.  Lots of probes get lost there -- BIG DEAL.  A Cassini Earth reentry would have been another story entirely.

An accidental start of a nuclear war is a horror beyond imagination -- you don't accept the full consequences of that horror, but we've no need to go into that again.  Some day hopefully, you'll learn -- or is it just accept what you already know in your heart? -- the whole ugly truth, and when you do (hopefully before it's too late, whatever that means) I expect you will apply all your energies to help those of us who love the Earth and want to protect the Earth for our children, our friends, and our families (and yes, even for ourselves).  And for the other animals that share Earth with us.  It is true that if loving everyone on Earth regardless of race, creed, color, religion, nationality, wealth, family history, or anything else is unAmerican then I am unAmerican, for I do love people.  But I believe this country was founded by people who believed that ALL of us are created equal and should be given a healthy planet to live in, and be free from danger, want and injustice.  Not just Americans but everyone.  That concept alone should make nuclear war unthinkable to you, because it kills so many innocents.

It is only our various depraved societies which keeps us each from remaining equal throughout the rest of our lives, unless of course, we have evil in our hearts which we let control our actions.  Or unless others do evil to us.

You have offered absurdities, but I do not believe you are an idiot.  "Proof!" you cry for.  "Proof!"  You have plenty of proof.

But I'll agree with you, that there is only one sure proof -- perhaps it is coming on Y2K.  That one sure "proof" you would accept, is a live test.  But then it's too late.  What did YOU offer as any sort of proof that I am wrong?  Only the silliest of statements!  You said that there are 22 operational nuclear power plants in Yugoslavia which we had not managed to destroy despite using non-nuclear EMP weapons against them.  That was YOUR proof against overwhelming evidence that what I say is true.  Those so far are still your only counter-arguments, and they are bogus.  (For one thing, I sincerely hope our/NATO troops would be smarter than to attack a nuclear power plant with an EMP weapon of any sort.)

In fact there are no operational nuclear power plants in Yugoslavia (lucky for them!), and only one long-dormant research plant near Belgrade (which doesn't need a constant flow of electricity to keep it cool enough not to melt down).

There is only one sure way to prevent the dangers society faces from Y2K and every day -- dismantle the nukes.  Right now there are thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

There are madmen everywhere, at every level of society.  There is nothing society can do to prevent madmen from getting at the controls once in a while.

There is MUCH that society can do, however, to prevent those madmen at whatever level of society they exist at, from doing significant harm to society.  There is much that can be done, but very little of it is actually being done.

I do not believe the Russian people are as stupid as the Russian commanders would have us Americans believe.  Nor do I believe they hate us as much as all the leaders on both sides would have us believe.  Nor do most of us hate them as you would have us suppose, in order to agree to their slaughter (and ours).  But sane people do not accept nuclear war as an alternative -- it gets ugly way too quick.

Right now there are calls for videotape recorders in the cockpits of airplanes.  I agree with that completely -- because I am a true supporter of "high-technology".  I love the stuff.  I think that nuclear power plants should ALSO have live feeds on the Internet so the public can see exactly what is happening at the plant at all times.  Their radiation monitors should be  available instantly on the Internet to anyone and everyone (as JAVA-enabled graphical displays?).  Most other facilities, government meetings, etc. etc. etc. should all be available to the public via our wonderful real high-technology known as the Internet (which would also be destroyed by a nuclear EMP).

That's the HIGH-TECHNOLOGY WORLD sane people are trying to build.  Your nukes suck and your lies and innuendos, and claims, over and over, that I haven't provided enough "proof", are shocking, silly, and supremely stubborn.

I fear God.  I believe he wants us all to find the truth, and the truth is frightening.

"He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool." (Proverbs 10:18)

You try to hide your hatred of me.  You deny it, and meanwhile, you slander me, you won't publish any corrections, and you won't change your strange and dangerous views.  Together such actions prove your hatred, for I need your help to tell people what is so, not your unfair wrath for trying to warn the public of what we must change to survive!

Worse yet, you call an ongoing war against humanity a total non-event.  Why do you do these things?  Is it to keep the population from demanding a proper change?  To keep them from becoming panicky?  I have no idea why you would not want the world to know the full truth of what might befall them, but you don't.  I therefore conclude you do not serve democracy well, for democracy demands the truth.

You Sir, are a fool.  A dangerous one, misleading the people in their hour of greatest need.  The people have a right to know the full truth of what the dangers are as well as what the ONLY possible solution is: Disarmament and dismantling of the tools of the nuclear "demon hot atom". 

Sincerely,
 
Russell D. Hoffman

Attachment: News clip showing how things just go from bad to worse:

===== clip from news item (forwarded by NHNE):=====

Wednesday 17 November 1999
Y2K compliance sparked fire-hall fireball: union
MICHAEL MAINVILLE
Eileen Travers
Montreal Gazette

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/991117/3159499.html

Attempts by the city of Montreal to stave off a Y2K computer disaster are
being blamed for causing the blaze that gutted Fire Station 26 in Plateau
Mont Royal on Monday night.

And the Montreal firefighters' union is saying that more than half the
city's fire stations face the same computer problem - making them accidents just waiting to happen.

Monday's blaze was determined by police to be accidental, after a
firefighter left a batch of french fries cooking on the station's stove when
he responded to a fire on nearby Iberville St.

But fire-department officials also confirmed yesterday that a breaker switch
designed to shut off the stove when firefighters respond to a call had been
disabled when the city made its computer systems Y2K ready.

====== end clip from news item =====


----- END OF MY RESPONSE -----


(5) Tell Clinton how you feel -- Official government contact points

To contact the top government officials: President Bill Clinton
White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20500
Phone -- (202) 456-1111
Fax -- (202) 456-2461
e-mail -- president@whitehouse.gov

Vice President Albert Gore
White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,
N.W.,Washington, D.C. 20500
Phone -- (202) 456-1414
Fax -- (202) 456-2461
e-mail -- vicepresident@whitehouse.gov

Secretary William Cohen
1000 Defense
The Pentagon
Washington D.C. 20301
Phone -- (703) 695-6352
Fax -- (703) 695-1149

Secretary Bill Richardson
Department of Energy (DoE)
1000 Independence Avenue SW
Washington D.C. 20585
Phone -- (202) 586-6210
fax -- (202) 586-4403

Always include your full name and postal address in all correspondence to any Government official of any country, because otherwise they will throw it out unread, or hand it directly to their police force to try to identify the author. (Thus, nothing good will come of it.) Also, ALWAYS include a personal message of some sort, indicating YOUR OWN VIEWS, even if you include a lot of material written by other people (me, for instance).

NASA needs to be told in no uncertain terms they have lied too often to the public and we want a SEA CHANGE away from their nuclear policies!

To learn about the absurd excuses NASA used to launch Cassini and its 72.3 pounds of plutonium in 1997, ask them for the 1995 Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini mission, and all subsequent documentation. At the same time, be sure to ask them for ANY and ALL documentation available on future uses of plutonium in space, including MILITARY, CIVILIAN, or "OTHER" (just in case they make a new category somehow!). To get this information, contact:

Cassini Public Information
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
(818) 354-5011 or
(818) 354-6478

Here's NASA's "comments" email address: comments@www.hq.nasa.gov

Daniel Goldin is the head of NASA. Here's his email address:
daniel.goldin@hq.nasa.gov
or
dgoldin@mail.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

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW WHAT NASA IS DOING TO YOUR HEALTH.

NASA should never have been allowed to launch monstrosities like Cassini and Galileo, but the next breed -- such as Europa Orbiter and Pluto-Kuiper Express are not much better and the policy is being set for greatly increased rates of missions! The danger continues! To complain to NASA about their future nuclear space probes, here are two addresses you can use:

For Europa Orbiter:
Europa Orbiter comments" osseuropa@hq.nasa.gov

For Pluto-Kuiper Express:
"Pluto-Kuiper Express comments" osspluto@hq.nasa.gov

Be sure to "cc" the president and VP and your senators and congresspeople, too.

(6) Newsletter subscription information:

Thanks for reading! Welcome new subscribers!

Home page of our STOP CASSINI movement:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm (Beware of imitations!)

To subscribe, simply email the editor at
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com and state:
SUBSCRIBE STOP CASSINI NEWSLETTER
Please include a personal message of any
length and subject matter. Thank you!

To unsubscribe email me and say
UNSUBSCRIBE STOP CASSINI NEWSLETTER

Published by Russell D. Hoffman electronically.
Written in the United States of America.
This newsletter is free and is not distributed for profit.
The opinions expressed are those of the individual authors.
Please distribute these newsletters EVERYWHERE!

"There can be no democracy without truth, no justice without mercy, and no nuclear dispersals without ill consequences."

(7) Newsletter Authorship notes and additional URLs:

Note:

Many of the issues presented by Russell Hoffman in this letter are based on conversations with Dr. John W. Gofman (who isolated the first working quantities of plutonium), the late Dr. Karl Z. Morgan (who was known as the "father of health physics"), Dr. Ernest Sternglass (a noted epidemiologist who has done statistical studies about LLR), Dr. Jay Gould (ditto), Dr. Horst Poehler, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Dr. Ross Wilcock and dozens of activists, as well as many others on both sides of the nuclear debates, including ex military nuke expert Jack Shannon (responsible for the design of the D2G Navy reactor, the most widely used reactor in the U. S. navy), award-winning investigative reporter Karl Grossman, ecologist and human rights advocate Pamela Blockey-O'Brien, etc. Also, I've read a few dozen books on the various subjects. And scads of government documents purporting to explain how something so dangerous can be safe. Professionally, my pump training software is used throughout the pump industry and even in some nuclear power plants around the world to train their staff about mechanical pumps. Any errors herein are regrettably my own, but I believe it would take an extremely unlikely preponderance of errors to invalidate my basic position on these issues.

Russell D. Hoffman, Carlsbad, California, Peace Activist, Environmentalist, High Tech Guru:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/whoisrdh.htm

Hoffman's Y2K Preparedness Information:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/y2k/index.htm

Learn about The Effects of Nuclear War here:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/tenw/nuke_war.htm

************************************************************
** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY
** Russell D. Hoffman, Owner and Chief Programmer
** Carlsbad CA
** Visit the world's most eclectic web site:
** http://www.animatedsoftware.com
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This article has been presented on the World Wide Web by:

The Animated Software Company
http://www.animatedsoftware.com
Mail to: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
First placed online November 19th, 1999.
Last modified November 20th, 1999.
Webwiz: Russell D. Hoffman
 Copyright (c) Russell D. Hoffman