Discussion for article #232862
Death panels…I knew it! Those agents must have been really deep cover.
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Ageism…
LawksA-Mercy.
/s
I was born and raised in close proximity to the Bluegrass Army Depot. The Army has been trying to build something on that base to destroy the steadily deteriorating 1940-60’s vintage mustard and nerve gas shells stockpiled there since the early 1980s. And now, thirty years later,those shells are still stored there, the deterioration having now reached the point that leaking shells in the bunkers are a regular occurrence.
And, year after year, plan after plan, local NIMBYism by people who, IMO, were incapable of correctly weighing the risks of doing nothing against the risks of disposal, thwarted every proposal for destroying those shells and their contents.
High temperature incineration, chemical neutralization–you name it and the aging NIMBY hippies (the depot is in a county with a private college at one in and a regional state university at the other and the faculty meeting mentality infects even those nominally unaffiliated with Academe) generated grave concerns about how something might go wrong, or (this was my favorite) being deeply concerned that chemical neutralization would generate toxic waste, all the while apparently assessing “doing nothing” as a zero risk approach.
My favorite plan they came up with for dealing with the problem was, rather than building an incinerator onsite, loading all of the leaky, deteriorating nerve and mustard gas shells (did I mention that the bursting charges can’t be removed from them?) onto trains and railroading them all the way to Toole, Utah where the exact same kind of plant they were then opposing was already in operation. Because what could possibly go wrong?
I sincerely believe that the waspishness of my exasperation and the often undue intolerance I express when confronted by the earnestly well-intentioned magical thinker variety of liberalism was born of watching these people somehow, get even conservative members of Congress to bend to their irrationality year after year. Year after year, I’d come home for the holidays and discover that their imperviousness to the simple reality that there was no risk free option to dealing with the problem and that all of the options proposed by the Army were less risky than doing nothing remained intact.
The result is that they’re just now finally beginning construction of a disposal plant. More than thirty years later, they’ve either died out, moved away or finally accepted that doing nothing isn’t an option. And, in the process, they’ve succeeded in making doing something more dangerous and more expensive.
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But won’t these shells be necessary in our next sanctioned war against Iran, as they were in our previously sanctioned war against Iran when used by our proxy, Iraq?
Nah. When we’re bringing enlightenment to the heathen, we prefer to do it with bombs and shells that are more dangerous to those on the receiving than delivery end.