Thursday, July 16, 2015

Big History

Carol was very aware that today is the 70th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first really public atmospheric test.  "The Iran deal is a reminder that these weapons remain very much a presence on the planet" remarks Joel Achenbach in today's Washington Post.

Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was the management hub for that experiment.  The Hanford Nuclear Reservation got more involved later.

Movie footage from the Trinity Test is all over the Web.  The negative health effects of dumping radioactive fallout into the ecosystem was not the headline in those days.  Linus Pauling would help to inform the public about that side of the story.

Carol is 86 and still says "our" nuclear weapons or "what we did" regarding nuclear testing.  I'm more discriminating with my pronouns and don't want the stigma of having done any of this engineering, not my bailiwick.  I have no nuclear weapons and do not condone anyone having them.

To have them is to have the headache of needing to dismantle them.  So many white elephants!  Humans will be dealing with these waste items for the rest of their career here.

My thanks to Junior Friends and their advisers who shared about the Guatemala trip.  My daughter traveled with Quakers to both Nicaragua and Jamaica.  She's also been to South Africa (twice) as my parents were living in Lesotho when she was born, in 1994.