To: "Dr. Bill Corcoran at NSRC" <firebird.one@alum.mit.edu>
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: 9-11 should have taught us that our worst fears can come true
To: W. R. Corcoran, Ph.D., P.E., Nuclear Safety Review Concepts
From: Russell Hoffman, Carlsbad, CA
Re: 9-11 should have taught us that our worst fears can come true
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your email (shown below). A scan of the voluminous document you've alerted me to suggests it proves my point that the official 9-11 timeline is hokey, and it does so meticulously.
As the friend of mine who first detailed the timeline oddities to me put it, for the timeline to have any possibility of being accurate, our military fighter jets would have had to be flying backwards during some parts of the sequence. It's that inaccurate. We DO have British Harriers in our arsenal (the Marines use them) which actually can fly backwards, but they weren't used that day (and even if they had been used, we would have expected them to go forward and engage the enemy).
What we really need to know is why weren't our jets able to stop any of the horror, especially if the President -- and numerous underlings -- had some amount of prior knowledge that something awful was going to happen soon. Even with all that warning, when the moment came, not one plane was shot down -- NOT ONE. The undying question remains: Why not?
Even a bunch of untrained, unarmed, unlikely civilians on Flight 93 figured it out faster than the U.S. Government, to become heros, even among all the other heros, that day. Not only did these civilians figure it out first, but they may have saved us from a far worse tragedy than America experienced. Flight 93 might have been heading for a nuclear power plant (Three Mile Island, most likely).
The timeline inaccuracies are indeed "deeply disturbing" as the link you've provided puts it. Conspiracy to mislead the American public about 9-11 is treason. Why? I believe this country was founded on the concept that The People must have The Truth in order to decide how they should govern themselves. It is a basic tenant of the concept of SELF-GOVERNMENT. To be lied to by our own government IS tyranny!
Of vastly greater importance than questions about the timeline is this: What else is the Bush Administration lying to the public about?
It's fairly obvious that the Bush Administration isn't telling the truth about how the world's citizens view nuclear power -- even without a proper global debate on the ethics of nuclear war and the distribution of radionuclides into the environment. Nuclear power is despised by a lot more people who have investigated the problems carefully, than the nuclear industry would ever want to admit. Sure, you can always swing the masses with massive ad campaigns on T.V. about "clean coal technology", and not surprisingly, such ads started appearing in abundance right after 9-11. What's the connection? Simply that it can easily be shown that -- if one ignores all problems associated with nuclear waste -- coal creates more pollution than nuclear on a day-to-day basis, and much ballyhoo is made of this fact. Ignorant people will always vote
for nuclear if you present it as clean and harmless, and present the alternative as a cold dark death, either in a tunnel digging coal or above ground shivering in your blacked-out home.
Not everyone is fooled, however, and many people get emotional about nuclear pollution, because we've already lost loved ones, possibly due to radiation, and we know others are dying all around us. You, then you, then you. For example, my older brother died a few years ago of complications following leukemia, which is often caused by manmade radiation in the environment.
When we deplore the environmental damage of a hydroelectric dam or wind farm, but at the same time ignore the warning from Chernobyl and 9-11 (and Davis-Besse and San Onofre) to close down our nuclear power plants forever, we are ignoring the real problems of the real world.
When we fail to recognize that half a century of trying to solve what is, by the laws of physics, an unsolvable problem has proven that sure enough, we can't beat mother nature, we are ignoring the real problems of the real world. Spent nuclear fuel is an unsolvable problem even after half a century of effort, and some estimates of the amount of money already spent exceed half a trillion dollars. Yet we're no better off than when we started -- in fact, we're a lot worse off, because now we have 50,000 tons of high level nuclear waste we desperately need to try to hide from terrorists. And half a trillion less dollars to solve the problem with. And time, too, is running out. Our renewable energy programs are feeble and ineffective. Three decades ago, the switch to renewable energy was called "the moral equivalent of war" by then-President Jimmy Carter.
But instead, we bought more nuclear this, that, and the other thing: nuclear carriers (very expensive), nuclear bombs (even more expensive), bullets (cheap; that's why we use D.U.), armor (a Faustian Bargain, at best), and power plants (no bargain at all).
Why have so few renewable energy sources succeeded? Why is nuclear allowed to keep on keeping on, even when the dangers are now all-too-obvious? Why? "Follow the money" always made sense to me. For example General Electric is still one of the most powerful corporations in the world, despite a corporate criminal history which includes building scores of reactors in America and around the world, all of which are doomed to eventually become smouldering, leaking, oozing, deteriorating, radioactive deathtraps -- unless we shut 'em down and move the fuel to safer, more isolated, heavily guarded places. Not to mention, G.E.'s production of billions of light bulbs that burn more electricity than necessary, fostering the need for more nukes! Chernobyl -- not a G.E. reactor, but the point is still valid -- needs a new sarcophagus already!
And it's got about a million years or so left to go before its contents can be approached safely (without protective shielding, which then becomes irradiated "low level" waste). Our own nuclear mistake (and it's all been one big mistake) has also been, and will continue to be, very costly and dangerous.
Meanwhile, everyone loves to play the money game. Radiation detection and protection technology will be hot commodities for the next few hundred thousand years. Bottled water never looked so good as it will after four or five U.S. reactors lay in ruins. Invest wisely for the coming calamity. Our world will never be the same and the ONLY way to protect it is to close the reactors, and then ship the waste to one (or more) underground, guarded, multi-layered protected areas, as far away from all living things as possible. And THEN what do we do with it? I don't know. Keep studying it I guess, like knights gathered around a dead fire-breathing dragon (belching poisonous smoke long after its death).
I think America is ready to slay the nuclear dragon, so it stops spewing out NEW plutonium and uranium death-bricks known colloquially and inappropriately simply as "spent fuel". We just don't want people to think we're shutting the plants down because we're scared of Osama. Well fine, whatever. Just shut 'em! We need to do it because it's right. No more using D. U. weapons. No more threats of nuclear Armageddon. No more nuclear reactors at sea. We should immediately shut down OUR reactors and demand that our trading partners shut down theirs, and our military allies (and enemies!) stand down their nuclear arsenals, too. The jig is up. Humanity demands a universal nuclear stand-down.
Unfortunately, without a "gift from the Heavens", I doubt that the increased interest since 9-11 in shutting down the nuclear power plants will be enough to change the tide of disaster coming upon us for not changing our ways sooner. 9-11 was a wake-up. Davis-Besse was a warning. What's next? God only knows.
I don't consider myself a very religious man, personally. I started out thinking I was an atheist, then "converted" to being an agnostic once a friend carefully explained the difference to me (in high school). I'm 45 now. I was nearly killed in a couple of accidents and various other "unusual events" occurred in my life (some might call them "miracles"), so eventually I "got some religion", I believe. I have "faith" that there is a God, a loving God, a forgiving God. A good God. A God to whom we should all be praying for help from right now, because we need it. A God who can be revealed to us only through wisdom, love, and hope. We've already gotten ourselves in TOO DEEP for science alone to get us out (I fear). I used to be alone in that fear, but since 9-11, I've got lots of company. People see no way out, and calamities coming.
If we fail to protect our planet, let it at least be said that we tried. So far, I've seen nothing to indicate this country will come to grips with reality in time.
But is there a devil, somewhere between man's own inhumanity towards man, and the deep blue sea? I had never considered it possible, until I really learned about radiation's effects on babies (and on grownups) -- as well as on steel, glass, cement, and everything else we try to use to contain it and keep it away from babies (and grownups). Suddenly, one day, somewhere along the path of ever-increasing knowledge upon which we all try to embark, I realized, that there may or may not be another devil operating in our lives, but there surely is this one: The "Demon Hot Atom". Radiation is extremely devilish. The comparison is uncannily accurate.
What's all this got to do with Bush? He's a very religious man, or so he thinks.
Bush loves nukes. In Gods name, he goes to war with them, threatening to use them to kill terrorists with nuke-tipped "bunker busters". Such threats alone are likely to bring about at least the contemplation of a nuclear retaliation by those who have been threatened, regardless of "who is right".
Dick Cheney's secret energy policy is part of Bush's pro-nuker policy -- a policy that is mass-murder, plain and simple. But of course, when Bush talked to the Pope earlier this week, the topic was probably decades-old sex scandals in the priesthood, and Bush's ill-conceived "war on terrorism". I doubt they talked about state-sponsored nuclear terror. At least, not America's. (Maybe Pakistan's and India's, but not ours.)
Many of the Bush Adminstration actions during the past year, including various releases of information, misinformation, and disinformation, were planned to have an affect on the American psyche. Playing to our psyche is immoral. American citizens need to know what's really going on in the world, so that we can decide what we really want to do next, as a country. That's how self-government works. That's the only way it CAN work -- openly, honestly, and efficiently. Otherwise we have Government By Deception, which is what we have right now.
Nuclear is choking everything. It's the source of immense (yet largely futile) secrecy in the government, and immense (and unfortunately, largely successful) amounts of purposefully-inaccurate information from the government. These lies started spewing forth at the very beginning, during the Manhattan project, and continue today. We are lied to about the health effects to the planet of:
* Our nuclear ships and subs (About a dozen military nuclear subs of various nations have been lost at sea, including two American subs. Our Navy also dumped a used training reactor in the Atlantic a few decades ago.)
* Our commercial nuke power plants
* Our nuclear research labs
* Our nuclear waste dumps (proposed, operating, and being constructed as we speak)
* Spent nuclear fuel transportation problems
* We are even lied to about available choices of x-rays versus sonograms or MRIs in hospitals. Doctors love x-rays because they save the doctors' time over less invasive investigation methods. So what if it sometimes kills the patient via unprovable cancer 20 years later? The medical establishment will get paid to treat you for that too, and if you die, they can always get another patient.
Immediately after 9-11, kids in America (and a few wise adults) all asked "why does anyone hate us so much?" Now, more than half a year later, most Americans still have no idea. Are we even trying to find out?
9-11 should have taught us that our worst fears can come true.
Maybe the real problem is that we aren't paying enough attention to the plight of truth in an increasingly dishonest world. Maybe all our problems stem from that little glitch in our behavior. We American's are not evil, so much as disinterested, and when powerful people pay no attention to the plight of others, they are hated, even though individually, none of them so much as noticed the deaths around them -- of Iraqii babies from D.U. dust and bombed water supplies, of "thermobaric" bombs, of whole villages wiped out because shots were fired from somewhere in one of the houses, of threats of nuke-tipped "bunker busters", which become water-supply poisoners.
While we sit and argue about jet skis on our national park's lakes (a very real problem, in its own little way), we ignore the vastly more serious problems of the world -- problems which we could help solve, if we simply wanted to.
So, simple ignorance becomes brutality. Why? Because many people feel that our great nation doesn't do enough. That "feeling" is easily proven to be true, using normal accounting methods. Sure, we do give a lot, because we have a lot. But on a "per capita" basis, we don't do so much. And perhaps even more irritating to those "starving masses" we dismiss from thought with just two words ("starving masses"), we waste a lot. When people in poverty-stricken nations see us carelessly wasting that which might keep them alive, and they know they could have used those things much more wisely, it is very demoralizing, to say the least. So that is how simple ignorance becomes brutality, and breeds hatred.
When you are being killed and at the same time you are being ignored by those you perceive -- rightly or wrongly -- to be your killer (who, for example, are too busy arguing about jet skis), your situation is hopeless. 9-11 WAS a plea for attention. Exactly by whom, we don't know, but perhaps it doesn't really matter, in the end. That anyone would hate us that much suggests we ought to study the reasons why that might be so, as well as the various ways to protect ourselves from any future ire. "Nuke 'em!" as a response to aggression against us WILL come back to haunt us, over and over and over, for thousands of years.
For years the various Administrations have paid lip-service to the "swords to plowshares" programs. It's time to actually put these programs into place. Even to prosecute some of the most devastating wars since WWII, we didn't need nuclear carriers. Conventionally-powered carriers would have worked just fine. We didn't need to use Depleted Uranium weapons. Conventional shells would have worked just as well. We didn't need to threaten to use nuclear-tipped "bunker-busters", which would pollute rivers for generations to come. Are we at war with children? If not, and I say that we are not, then we have to stop using and threatening to use nuclear weapons, since radiation in the environment affects children and especially infants about ten times more than it affects adults.
For more than half a century, in an effort to keep their newly acquired "peacekeeping" nuclear weapons, the world's nuclear powers have ignored nuclear realities, from the potential severity of random accidents, to the reality of the likelihood of purposeful sabotage. This "head in the sand" attitude has put the world in great peril, and it is sure to catch up with us sooner or later.
I'm sure that a few meltdowns in America will cure us of our inattention, but the cost will be unbearable.
Many people believe the Chernobyl accident revealed to the Soviet people just how much their government was willing to hide, and that led to the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union. What will revealing America's own nuclear lies do to our Republic? Make it infinitely stronger, I hope, but we need to find out. We need "truth commissions" on all nuclear issues.
But then again, maybe we don't have time for that any longer. And we don't have the need, really: Our own elected leaders have the authority, moral and otherwise, to send Federal Marshals into ALL nuclear facilities in our country, at once (today), and demand they cease operation immediately, dropping their control rods forever. They have the authority, moral and otherwise, to demand that if there is any chance the lights will go out in some homes, that non-essential businesses cease operation until alternative energy sources can be provided.
They have the authority, moral and otherwise, to demand that after the plants are shut off, and hundreds of billions of dollars (or more -- whatever it takes), not merely millions, be put into each nuclear power plant's left-over spent fuel protection problems -- and finally, they have the authority, moral and otherwise, to seize the assets of the owners, and the previous owners, and the owners before that, to cover some of these costs. There should be no "statute of limitations" on financial gain from playing a part in producing the world's collective nuclear nightmare.
What our Federal Marshals have not had, at least until 9-11, was public backing for such actions.
Do they have it now? Let's hope so.
Regards,
Russell Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA
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At 06:16 PM 5/27/02 , "Dr. Bill Corcoran at NSRC" <firebird.one@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Russ,
Check this one out.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0202/S00079.htm
Best Regards,
Bill Corcoran
W. R. Corcoran, Ph.D., P.E.
Nuclear Safety Review Concepts
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Windsor, CT 06095-1634
860-285-8779
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