Tinkertoys at 9615 Shore Road,
Brooklyn p.46-1005
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Rug came from
Nicholson Rug factory in Russian section of Tientsin China l931. Card table
was used by Jack Barrett for study while at Boston College Law School
l941-l951 when living at 52 Emmonsdale Road, West Roxbury #368 ---1983 TEXT
A PROPOSAL FOR NUCLEAR - WEAPON - FREE CITIES John B. Barrett, jr. Congress
should prohibit deployment, storage, transportation, or manufacture of
nuclear weapons within forty or fifty miles of urban populations. The United
States & Soviet Union on a bilateral basis should agree to create and
de-target nuclear-weapon-free zones around all cities. A citizen should have
a legal, constititutional right not to have nuclear weapons placed in his
back yard in an urban area, both on safety grounds and from doctrines
relating to the law of war. Under the law of war it is probably a crime to
bomb an unarmed civilian population. But a warship with nuclear weapons is
probably a legal target. Why make San Francisco, Honolulu, New York, Boston,
or any city a legal target under the laws of war? The Soviets has assured
the Scandinavains they will respect NUCLEAR - WEAPON -FREE ZONES. The
century - old Hague Convention, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the United
Nations charter, and the American Catholic Bishops 1983 declaration on
nuclear weapons all prohibit the deliberate killing of innocent civilians,
unless they are near legitimate military targets. The Air Force has placed
most of its missles in thinly populated regions like North Dakota. The Navy,
however, has placed ships and nuclear weapons storage sites in areas like
San Francisco and Pearl Harbor and plans to deploy hundreds of nuclear
cruise missles at Staten Island, New York. Nicholas Yost of the Center for
Law in the Public interest in Washington DC has a suit pending in the DC
Court of Appeals on the failure of Caspar Weinberger to file Environmental
Impact Statements on the MX under the National Environmental Policy Act. In
July Mr. Yost also agreed to handle the environmental legal challenge to the
Battleship IOWA Task Force. Environmetal Impact Statements should include
Worst Case Scenarios -a nuclear accident or a war that could kill one
billion people, Mr. Yost argues in his MX brief. Dr. Carl Johnson, a public
health official in Jefferson county, Colorado, who investigated the medical
consequences of a nuclear acident at Rocky Flats. recommends that "from a
public health viewpoint nuclear weapons facilities should be located at
least forty miles from population centers, in isolated parts of the
country." Following a 1957 fire at a nuclear weapons plant,Dr. Johnson says
he knows of at least 241 people who have chromosome damage from plutonium
body burdens. In a population ner the plant Johnson found an excess of 24
per cent of all cancers in males and ten per cent in females. Constitutional
amendments may be desirable to restore local control to states and cities
over nuclear weapons hazards. There is a substantial popular movement to
create nuclear-free zones, but the constitutionality of state and local laws
is doubtful. Congress needs to take action, perhaps by constitutional
amendment. Speaking in Boston June 25, 1983 the noted British historian and
anti-nuclear activist Edward P. Thompson stated that a major nuclear weapons
accident is almost inevitable in the next ten years. Commnenting on plans to
station nuclear cruise missles in Boston, New York, or Newport, he remarked,
"It is absolutely criminal to base these missles in a heavily populated
center." He called for international solidarity in the peace movements of
American & Europe & east & west. Stephen Talbot of public television station
KQED made an important study of nuclear weapons facilites around San
Francisco in 1980, particularly at Concord Naval Weapons Station. "An active
earthquake fault runs less than two miles west of the weapons depot;
aqueducts delivering drinking water to more than one million people flow
through the base and would be subject to radioactive contamination, -...and
there is no evacuation plan for the more than 200,000 residents of ...
neighboring suburban communities:" NATION Jan. 7, 1981. Military authorities
are very secretive about nuclear weapons sites & have done little to work
out emergency procedures with the Federal Emergency Management Agency or
state & local officials. Talbot quotes Bill Arkin of the Center for Defense
Information, who estimates that there are more than one thousand nuclear
weapons in California, with over half in the San Francisco Bay area. The
National Association for Research on the Military-Industrial Complex, a
project of the American Friends Service Committee in 1980 compiled a list of
121 nuclear storage sites in the US. Nuclear weapons are located in at least
forty states. In Hawaii lawsuits have been filed to get the Navy to disclose
possible hazards of nuclear weapons storage at West Loch Naval Magazine at
Pearl Harbor, just two miles from Honolulu International Airport. Talbot
says weapons are transported over heavily populated areas in helicopter.
Columnist Jack Anderson says, "The tight-lipped people at the Pentagon admit
to 32 nuclear mishaps between 1950 and 1980. My sources say the true figure
is closer to four times that number.... Federal and state officials are
barely beginning to prepare for the dreadful possibility of a nuclear
disaster in your back yard... Allaying the public's fear more than
protecting its safety seems to be the main emphasis of the Defense
Department's emergency program to handle nuclear weapons accidents... in
urban areas ... the havoc could be unmanageable, if not beyond
comprehension." Anderson quotes a 1979 General Accounting Office report to
Congress, "An accident could occur while a weapon was being moved from one
location to another.... It would create a radiological cigar-shaped cloud
extending ... for about 28 miles, with a bwidth of 2.5 miles." A dangerous
accident took place at Holy Loch, Scotland in November, 1981, when a nuclear
missle was being transferred between a submarine and another US Navy ship by
"winching". The unstable chemical LX-09 in the detonator exploded. This
chemical is intended to be replaced eventually for safety reasons, but is
widely used on Navy nuclear missles. An Air Force officer was killed, and a
thousand people were evacuated when an explosion occured in a nuclear misle
silo near Damascus, Arkansas Sept. 19, 1980. Only conventional explosives in
the detonator went off, but the missle traveled 600 feet. Eight fuel leakage
accidents occured at Arkansas missle sites in 1979 and 1980. "BROKEN ARROW"
is the Pentagon code name for nuclear weapons accidents. B-52s used to stay
in the air on alert with nuclear weapons, until serious crashes occurred at
Palomares, Spain in 1966 - and Thule Greenland in 1968, with H-bombs
scattered and release of plutonium. Tons of contaminated soil, snow, water &
ice had to be moved to storage sites in the US. The US has more than 30,000
nuclear weapon warheads. About 120,000 people have access to nuclear weapons
and materials. Boston psychiatist Dr. Lester Grinspoon is one of many
authorities who have studied alcohol, drug & personality problems among
servicemen at nuclear installations. Lloyd J. Dumas, writing in Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists November 1980 on "Human Fallibility and Weapons" cites
several Department of Defense studies on abuse of marijuana, psychedelics,
stimulants, depressants, and narcotics. Stress, monotony, boredom, &
isolation also affect many servicemen at nuclear installations. About 5000
military personnel annually have to be transferred away from the nuclear
weapons program because of personality problems. Dumas reports that "there
is a serious problem of transmission of valid information to the upper
echelons, especially where such information points out errors made either by
subordinates or by top-level decision-makers.... Former missleman Ted Wye
(reports) that in a silo - based strategic nuclear missle force, 'Crew
members dare not tell higher command that the regulations are flouted.
Non-communication with higher command is endemic in the missle field with
the result a gap between regulations and what is really done in the
capsule.'" Admiral Gene LaRocque says, "Everybody ought to know where the
military weapons are. The reason the military does not tell people whether
or not there are weapons on a ship or stored in a certain place is they are
afraid people would be unhappy about it & want those weapons moved. But that
does not make those people who live in the vicinity any safer.." Among the
advantages of a freeze and reduction of nuclear warheads will be the reduced
risk of serious nuclear weapons accidents. Admiral LaRocque says a major
accident is inevitable unless there is a sharp reduction in the number of
nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, & drastic improvement in safety &
handling procedures, & greater public awareness. Mayors & municipal
officials should join in calling on Congress to prohibit nuclear weapons
with 40 or 50 miles of cities and provide constitutional guarantees of the
rights of citizens to be safe in their homes and workplaces. An urban Bill
of Rights on nuclear safety is urgent. De-targeting of cities should be an
important ingredient of a verifiable bilateral freeze. SOURCES: Stephen
Talbot "Nuclear Weapons Accidents: The H-Bombs Next Door" THE NATION Jan.
7,1981 -2. Boston Sunday Globe Dec. 13, 1981 p. 12 World Press by Alan
Berger "A Missle Mishap - N-Weapon Hit U.S. Ship but Didn't Explode" -3.
John Lindsay "How Many Mistakes Have You Made Today? Nuclear Weapons
Accidents and U.S. Responsibility" (Mobilization for Survival Flyer) -4.
Jack Anderson "Are we Safe from Our Own Nuclear Weapons?" Parade, Oct. 18,
1881 pp 12-14 - 5. Lloyd J. Dumas "Human Fallibility and Weapons". Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists Nov. 1980 pp 15-20. - 6. PEACEWORK July-August 1983
p. 1 - "E.P.Thompson calls for Internationalization of Anti - Nuke Forces at
Boston Harbor Teach-In." |