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?

Comments

and for New York

[SysadminFromHell]

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.

Re:ahh, something to be proud of.

[NixterAg]

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).

You know, the same weapon you claim has left our country on the edge of destruction is also responsible for keeping our country from destruction in those same 50 years. I very much like my life here in the US and whether you like it or not, nuclear weapons have played a big role in making sure I have that life to enjoy.

Re:How about a /. plate?

[handsomepete]

It would never happen. Too many of the people interested would boycott it because they'd have to pay for it.

License plates dont have to be politically correct

[shoppa]

License plates don't have to be universally approved or politically correct to have meaning and relevance. If that were the case, we'd have nothing but boring "beige" plates on all the cars.

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.

Re:Slow Day

[DutchSter]

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.

Nevada can't change its past

[dfn5]

In Nevada's past nuclear testing happened. It led to a Nuclear weapon that helped put an end to WWII which ultimately led to fewer lives lost on our side. That, in turn, led to a form of power generation that is, I hate to say, cleaner to the environment than fossel fuels. The waste merely needs to be dealt with responsibly.

So if Nevada wants to be proud of their history instead of ashamed of it, more power to them.

Nuclear waste in outer space

[dillon_rinker]

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 =)

Re:ahh, something to be proud of.

[hij]

I spent a year in the mountain west, and there is a very strong anti-us government undercurrent there. Last year a Utah congressman aired commercials saying that his father was a "down-winder" (local parlance for those downwind of the Nevada test sites). This was his way of making sure everybody knew he had the requisite distrust of government needed for someone in the government.

The license plate is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder for many people who in the words of one former governor "fear the government in Washington DC more than the one in Moscow." Many people see this as a symbol of the way they have been abused and is not a symbol of pride in any sense!

Associating Nukes with Cars

[hanway]

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.

Re:New Mexico...

[jimhill]

Sadly, that goddamned balloon fiesta has commandeered any and all "Yay, NM!" stuff. Dollars to dildoes when our state quarter comes out it (like the license plates) will sport a Zia-marked balloon.

Re:My Entry

[AJWM]

"+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.

Unfair

[Sivar]

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."