Defendable But Undefended

At the present time, the United States has no strategic missile defense - even though her scientists and engineers are easily capable of building one; she has no tactical nuclear weapons - even though her scientists and engineers built a complete inventory which was then ordered destroyed by President George Bush; she has no biological weapons - these were destroyed by treaty with the Soviet Union, which nevertheless continued to build biological weapons; she is currently incinerating her entire stockpile of chemical weapons - even though these weapons continue to be accumulated by her enemies in many countries; and she has no civil defense program whatever - not even the pitiful evacuation and radiological monitoring program that was in place until its termination by the Bush and Clinton Administrations.

In those days of 1994, the third and last director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory civil defense research program, Dr. Conrad V. Chester, could think of only one final action. He acted to preserve a printed record of American engineering research knowledge about civil defense so that, if his country ever decides to provide civil defense protection for its people, the engineers of that day will have this information available.

Conrad Chester died from natural causes on 16 August, 1996. Dr. Chester, whose death was not noticed by the American people, gave his life to the development of the means to protect those people and their families from very real and continuing dangers in the modern world - means that the gaggle of 20th century politicians and bureaucrats have been too selfish and shortsighted to implement.

Ah, but we are told that all of the threats are gone. Just this past month our new Russian friends were whiling away their time firing multiple tests of their newest submarine-launched ballistic missiles -missiles for which the only practical target is the United States. This, of course, must just be a new and more spectacular form of disarmament. If they keep the tests going for the next 50 years, maybe they will run out of missiles. Anyway, who are we to say that nascent free enterprise in Russia should be discouraged by prohibiting them from participating in the growing world market for weapons of mass killing along with entrepreneurs in North Korea, mainland China, Syria, Iran, and other innovators in the field of population control.

If anyone ever unleashes this nuclear, biological, or chemical technology upon the American people - and there are many capable individuals in the world who would like to do so - the ingenious defenses that Connie Chester and his patriotic professional colleagues invented to protect Americans will probably not be available.

I was fortunate to meet Dr. Chester at the American Civil Defense Association meeting in 1985 and, through his generosity, to have the opportunity to read about 1,000 of the documents at the Oak Ridge Emergency Technology Library in 1986. (He and Greg Zimmerman had identified the most valuable 1,000 in their ORNL review report No. 6252 published in 1986.) Over the years, he has given me information and advice on numerous technical subjects such as that evident in one of the articles below. His wisdom and engineering knowledge were very remarkable. Each year, except in 1996 due to poor health, he traveled to meetings of the DDP and other organizations to share information both about dangers and available defenses.