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The Perfect Plate for the Nuclear Family Car
In what must be a dream come true for some, Nevada has approved a License Plate commemorating the Test Site and the connections Nevada enjoys with Nuclear weapons in the United States. The Associated Press article on the subject notes that a lot of people are up in arms about the new design, as Nevada is embroiled in controversy over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. The license features an atom. a mushroom cloud as the background and the equation E=mc2 on the plate.
I was unable to find a picture of the plate on the web (I saw it in my morning paper). I'm sure a picture must be on the web somewhere. I'll leave it to slashdotters to suggest the best personalized lettering for the plate. My entry: DUKNCVR?
First, at the time the testing went on it was a great feat to have accomplished. Now, after the recent graphs showing exactly how much radiation is centered in that area and how much has spread across the rest of the nation I don't see how you could possibly be proud of this.
Second, how can we be proud of creating a weapon that caused such destruction and left our country (and the world) on the edge of destruction for nearly 50 fucking years (and currently, moving closer to the edge than ever before).
Third, shouldn't the license plate feature the rushing fire-storm, both flash and radiation burns, sickness, and cancer?
What do I know though, I have not been infiltrated by as much radiation as those crazy license plate designers in NV.
...is truly the only state that deserves such a license plate.
The Trinity Site on white sands missile range.
Just because there were nuclear tests in nevada, should they get a license plate featuring a nuclear blast? I think NOT!
to have his most recognizable work put on a licence plate celebrating nuclear weapons - which he came to oppose.
I propose the skyline-licence-plate. And as a primer, it should come in two kinds. On front of the car it pictures the New York skyline before september 11th, on the back you get the same picture, but without the WTC.
It would never happen. Too many of the people interested would boycott it because they'd have to pay for it.
Let's see, off the top of my head:
- New Hampshire - Live Free or Die. Luckily this resonates strongly
on both sides of the aisle.
- District of Colubmia - Taxation without Representation. Makes a point, does so with historical relevance, yet the possibility of a DC vote in congress is hated and despised by the majority of congress - who are forced to view it every day
:-)
Excising the Manhattan Project and the Cold War from history is something I'm sure that a certain fraction of the world would like to do. But face it, millions of Japanase civilians and probably a million US serviceman would've died if the conventional war had continued. If Nevada wants to take pride in this, it's fine by me.Exactly. If the plate sells, there must be a demand, and the group will get money for it. If not, it'll be yanked. In my state (Ohio), if you don't sell a certain number of custom plates every year it gets yanked.
I certainaly understand that it wasn't exactly the highlight of the state's history, but hey... An earlier poster had a CNN link that said 800 of the 100,000 workers fell ill. I'm not an industry expert, but 0.8% illness/death for an industry seems pretty low. Back when this was all happening, industrial jobs were still pretty dangerous (heck some still are!), and it wasn't *that* uncommon for someone to have to quit on disability or be killed in a given year.
So if Nevada wants to be proud of their history instead of ashamed of it, more power to them.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Its amusing that people are opposed to nuclear waste in outer space...after all, the mass of all nuclear waste in the sun is probably greater than the mass of everything on earth. For that matter, the mass of radioactive materials on earth is probably orders of magnitude greater than all the radioactive materials mined/produced/enhanced by human beings.
Only idiots are fundamentally morally opposed to radioactive material or its production. The only rational basis on which to oppose it is safety. Not that this is a trivial basis =)
You lack cluefulness.
The Bomb was Einstein's idea (among others). Sure, he recanted his advocacy of it in later life, but if he hadn't laid the groundwork for it in the first place, he, along with many of the rest of us, might have died with altogether different thoughts.
Sure.. Nukes are bad... But you can argue that they are the best thing that happened to us and that its the Nukes themselves that saved human race from ultimate destruction.. How?? You could argue that nukes serve as deterrent that keeps all the major world powers from going into the war.. think about it.. Without Nukes to serve as deterrent US and Russia would have probably went into a war that would have costed millions of lives.. So as bad as they are, you could argue that nukes brought STABILITY since no country is willing to risk complete destruction.. So when u look at the nukes as pacifying factor in world today then really it does not seem as bad. Few times Nukes have been used in Japan probably prevented an all out ground war between Japanese and Americans that could have resulted in far greater number of casualties then it was the case in Hiroshima and Ogasaki..
One could probably make a case that gasoline-powered automobiles have had much more devastating negative effects on the world than nuclear weapons and nuclear energy put together: pollution, global warming, urban decay, and so on. If you buy that argument, then it's denigrating to nuclear testing to depict it on an auto license plate.
American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher
She set out to debunk the allegations of high illness rates associated with the Manhattan Engineering District.
She instead wrote a book about the "downwinders." Extremely sobering, even heartbreaking.
"+1, interesting" -- as in: now there's an interesting example of historical revisionism.
So Japan was "on the edge of a surrender"? Hardly. And while there may have been a faction that wanted an end to the war, the militarists in control were in no way going to allow a surrender, at least not without a bloody, massive invasion of the home islands that would make Normandy look like a seaside picnic. The nukes brought something enough radically different to the equation that a surrender could be negotiated with less loss of face.
And in a technology-driven World War, there may be civilians, but there are no non-combatants. The "civilian" industrial complex was a key part of the war machine on all sides. As it was, fewer people died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki than in the "conventional" firebombings of various cities earlier in the war.
-- Alastair
I don't think it's fair to associate Albert Einstein's theory of relativity with a mushroom cloud. The theory and Einstein himself were about advancing the state of human knowledge, not destroying it. It was even Einstein himself who made the famous quote, ""I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
...there may be civilians, but there are no non-combatants.
That's a good thing to keep telling yourself while you are flying toward a skyscraper and thinking of ways to justify your actions.