The legacy

Some very minor defects of the nuclear weapons industry have been picked out to fuel the fight against national defense. These defects are not only minor technically, but they are next to non-existent compared to the real defense problems of the country.

Technically, the media machine has turned on the hysterics about the "runaway" K Reactor at Savannah River, the "radioac-tive pollution" by the Fernald, Ohio, enrichment plant, the "plutonium pollution" by the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, and the "unsafe" N Reactor in Hanford, Wash.

These four, and the other eleven nuclear weapons sites, are indeed troubled, but not by the scare concoctions of the media The K Reactor's "runaway" excursions were never covered up; they were too small to trigger even an automatic reset (let alone automatic shut-down). Uranium is so low in radiation that the Fernald emissions over its entire 30-year history were only a frac-tion of the radioactivity put into the atmosphere by burning coal in the US in any single year. And the toxicity of plutonium is such that Prof B.L. Cohen has not found anybody willing to eat as much caffeine as he will eat of the "most toxic substance known to man."

What is really troubling these plants is that they are getting old and need modernization or replacement. During the last days of the Reagan administration, the DoE put the bill for modernizing the plants at $244 billion over the next twenty years, $32 billion of it for "environmental restoration," and much of that probably important only for PR effects.

But if $244 billion, or $12.2 billion/year is close to the amount needed, it is peanuts in the federal budget, whose expenditures have long exceeded one trillion dollars/year. The legitimate part of it, prevention or countering of aggression, has been fairly con-stant at 6% of GNP, since Carter (not Reagan) stopped its steady decline. Add the judicial and some other items that prevent or combat force and fraud, and you have around $700 billion illegitimately spent on things where government is at best a coercive middleman.

Yet all of this scratches only the surface of nuclear deterrents and defense. Just as nuclear power is being singled out as a scary bogey in order to stifle all energy production, so nuclear weapons are singled out as a scary bogey to stifle all defense. Would the antinukes raving against nuclear weapons be willing to defend freedom with artillery, rifles and if need be, slingshots? Of course not: they are unwilling to defend it at all.

Nuclear weapons, rendered ineffective as deterrents by high technology and an unnerved West, do have special qualities as weapons. For one thing, they are cheap and dirty. Compared to other weapons, they are cheap in dollars and dirty in radioactive pollution (if detonated at or below ground level). But they are also cheap and dirty in another sense: they seduce people into the illusion of push-button war by the computer wizards who will take care of everything. The Soviets, under Gorbachev or whoever is bound to replace him, have no such illusions: they train their entire population for both aggressive war and civil defense.

Not so America. Against the cheap and dirty Soviet nuclear weapons it has no defense beyond tiny volunteer groups who get not a cent from the $300 billion defense budget. The one and only fully effective deterrent against war is a population's will to resist and capacity to win; and that is being steadily eroded by those who control the means of mass information, and by their minions in Congress and the administration.

In civil defense, Switzerland spends $42.95 per each Swiss head it is obliged to protect; the US government spends 57 cents per each American head that it bamboozles with Public Rela-tions stunts about negligible dangers from nuclear weapons reactors.

But apparently not even the crummy 12 billion/year for their modernization and replacement is to be made available. The defense budget has just been frozen (i.e., condemned to diminish as a fraction of GNP) by Washington's new congressional agency that Ronald Reagan left as his legacy: the White House.