PITIFUL WIMPS

Not since TMI and Chernobyl has there been such an assault on nuclear reactors, this time the weapons reactors run by the DoE. Both Slime and Newspeak ran cover stories on "The nuclear scandal." The New York Slimes, with all the news refitted to print, at press time is still wallowing in the self-fabricated mud with almost daily articles. The false scare stories are always accompanied by charges of a cover-up by the Reagan administration.

That charge is just about the only kernel of truth, though not in the way the hacks mean it. Confronted with a series of minor lapses of regulations in the weapons industry, the pitiful wimps of the Reagan administration did cover up the truth, whining " we have sinned" instead of explaining why the charges were trivial. It is true that funds to replace 45-year old weapons plants, with Congress cutting what little Reagan proposed, were unavailable; but that is a poor answer to the media's fictions. It is also true, as the WSJ pointed out in its editorial "Unilateral disarmament" (11/4/88, avail-able in Fort Freedom), that shutting down the nuclear weapons in-dustry is more dangerous than any safety violations, but the technical specifics may be the best way to unmask this new leftwing campaign for disarmament masked by the guise of safety concerns.