Free File Viewers For Movies, Photos, Audio, PDF, Word Clone

FILE VIEWER INFO

Message Board

 

You have to wonder what people are thinking about when entire countries are investing in Doomsday projects. On the surface the idea of building underground vaults to contain seeds that would survive a disaster might seem as a good idea and indeed it must have seemed like one to those who built it. The vault is being built on Spitsbergen, a four island chain that is about 1,000 miles north of Norway. The people building it state that they are protecting the seeds from nuclear war, asteroid strikes or even climate changes and go on to say that even if life is wiped out, these seeds will survive. The entire project is being paid for by the Norwegian government. Well I guess it is better than using those funds for weapon purchases. When I look at this I can't help but feel that the tail is wagging the dog here. Isn't the idea to prevent us from going to nuclear war, prevent asteroids from hitting us and to try and reverse global warming? What good will the seeds do, if there is no one around to use them or if the Earth's climate has changed severely and they won't grow? I don't like to see it being made easy for a nuclear war. Some jerk might just say, lets drop the bomb on them, even it it destroys the food supply. We can always use those seeds in the vault to grow more crops.

Truthfully, I don't know what is worse, all those programs on tv predicting the end of the world, or all those little projects that are supposed to protect a tiny portion of the human race, so we don't become extinct. One thing that we probably don't need is a project to protect humanity. If we beef up our space travel capabilities, we could easily build bases on the moon that would take care of that. I remember all those people that built those tiny bomb shelters in the 1960s. They have food and water in them that would have lasted for about 6 months. The reality of the matter was that those that would have died in the blast would probably have been better off than those in the shelters even if they didn't get irradiated immediately. They would have had to come out in six months or so and things still would have been radioactive and they would have had to drink radioactive water and eat radioactive food, so I don't think that this was much of a solution. I think that they were misled by seeing those huge shelters built for the government and figured that if it was good enough for our leaders, it was good enough for them. What they didn't realize was that if things were still bad outside, the people in the government would have been flown to a safer place, but they didn't have this option.

Soviet Military Parade
Photo Source: White House

During the cold war the threat was that the Soviet Union or the United States would launch missiles at each other by mistake and that is how the war would start. Indeed that almost happened a couple of times and during one of the worst periods a Soviet Colonel was ordered to fire his missiles at the U.S. and refused, thus preventing nuclear war. He thought that what the Soviet radar was registering was not an incoming missile, but a bug in the system. It turned out he was right. The Colonel was Eugeny Podkletnov and he was honored by the UN for his deeds and rightfully so. We all owe this man not only our gratitude, but in many cases, also our lives. The threat today is much different. The Soviets were not mad men, they were not ready to launch unless they thought that we launched against them first. Today we have to worry about mad men. During the cold war we were worried about missiles more than anything else, but today we know that probably is not where the threat to the U.S. will come from. It may come from a nuclear device that was smuggled into the country. Hey the device might not even be nuclear, it could be biological or conventional with nuclear material wrapped around it. This is commonly know as a dirty bomb.

If a dirty bomb goes off in a place like New York City, it could not only kill a lot of people who would take a couple of weeks to die, it would render parts of the city uninhabitable. We all know about this now, we certainly have heard about it enough times. Since the terrorist act of 9/11, scientists have been looking into many different ways of detecting with nuclear materials. Some scientists have said in a paper that radiation detectors at borders and at portals are not good enough, because they must be within 2 to 4 feet of a shielded radioactive source to detect it. One of the problems with this system of detection devices, besides the one cited above, is the fact that the nuclear material might be smuggled in and not pass through a port or portal. It has been suggested that portable nuclear detection devices be fitted to vehicles. An example of this might be to put them on city buses, garbage trucks etc. This, it is said, would increase the chances of detecting nuclear materials. I don't know how well this would work, since we are constantly transporting nuclear materials all over the country ourselves. The major problem is that the thicker the shielding and the further the distance, the longer it takes to detect gamma rays. We could be talking about many hours here, so it seems that gamma ray detection is almost useless if shielding is used. Just using lead, concrete or steel can render passive detection impossible beyond 1 meter in range using gamma and neutron detection equipment.

It certainly looks like the best way to protect ourselves is to change our policies. If we go back and look at a country like Iran, it is no wonder that they hate us. We helped install and kept in power the Shah of Iran who tortured and killed thousands of Iranians. After that, we supported Saddam Hussein against them in a war and never complained when he used poison gas against them that was outlawed since World War I. What should we expect, other than hate? It will be a long hard road and many will find it hard to trust us, but we should try now to turn things around. We have to stop our policy of picking out enemies and then constantly saying that eventually we will be at war with them. We never wanted to acknowledge North Korea after the war. Maybe if we met with them, we could have prevented the situation today between North and South and not had to worry about the North exporting nuclear technology? I have no way to be sure of this, but it was certainly worth a try. Our policies certainly have not helped us.

Yes it is time for completely new policies and we should try to forge them in such a way that we get along with our neighbors. We all share only one planet and weapons have gotten to dangerous. A thousand years ago you threw a spear and if you were lucky and your enemy unlucky, you killed him. Today you drop a nuclear bomb or send over a nuclear missile and you kill a million people or even more if the area is densely populated. Can we really afford this kind of thing anymore? War is a sign of social backwardness, not advancement, even though the technology of it may be advancing. If weapons keep getting more powerful there can only be one ultimate outcome, we will wipe ourselves out. We can't afford to wait until we reach this level of technology. I don't know how far away we are from a doomsday weapon, but given the fast pace of technological advancement we just might have one already.