AMERICAN HISTORY IS ONE BIG LIE AFTER ANOTHER: • THING OGNEO T:O WMASTERE’RE IANDEXBOUT OF W FARFAREREEDOM (FREEDOM BEING THE FREEDOM TO OWN SLAVES) • THING TWO: RAIN FOLLOWS THE PLOW (I.E., HOMESTEADS FOR WHITES) • THING THREE: NATURE IS TO BE CONTROLLED (WE DRAIN SWAMPS, LEVY RIVERS, ETC.) • THING FOUR: WAR IS PEACE (AND ATOMS’RE FOR ELECTRICITY) • THING FIVE: IT IS ICBM THROW-WEIGHT THAT PUTS MEN ON THE MOON, TRA LA HDT WHAT? INDEX MEN ON THE MOON ICBMS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “I thought that people would not like the prospect of being fried with their families and their neighbors and every living person that they had heard of. I thought it would only be necessary to make the danger known and that, when this had been done, men of all parties would unite to restore previous safety. I found that this was a mistake. There is a motive which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow.” — Bertrand Russell’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY (3 Volumes, 1967, 1968, 1969) WALDEN: As with our colleges, as with a hundred “modern PEOPLE OF improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not WALDEN always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. ADELAIDE HARRIET MARTINEAU “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.... The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake.... You’re so goddamned HDT WHAT? INDEX MEN ON THE MOON ICBMS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE concerned about the civilians, and I don’t give a damn.” — President Richard Milhous Nixon, on tape, 1972 “Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war, I get so bored I could scream!” —Scarlet O’Hara Nuclear peace is a cover story, sponsored by a people who are covering up after perpetrated two nuclear atrocities. There exists in our psychology a perpetual war between reality and self-delusion. What is real is simple and obvious but often needs to be ignored. Every battle in this psychological war is won by our self-delusion, but needs for self-delusion are ever- changing. One century’s need for self-delusion expresses itself in one peculiar manner, and then after a century or so there is a ground-shift in our psychology and the self-delusions we come to require are similar but different. When our need for self- delusion shifts in this manner, the simple and obvious reality that had previously been hotly denied and attacked comes to be simple and obvious to all. Reality wins as soon as no-one any longer needs to reject and repudiate it. Thus it is in our saga of atomic power. We claimed that we had won WWII by dropping a couple of advanced A-bombs on Japan. HDT WHAT? INDEX MEN ON THE MOON ICBMS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Actually the weapons we employed on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki amounted to low-tech dirty bombs, not much resembling the nuclear detonations we had been scheming. These devices did not so much as leave craters. The damage we photographed was mostly due to structure fires they occasioned on the ground. They amounted to the type of device that unskilled terrorists might nowadays fashion in some cavern in the mountains of the Hindu Kush — but then our propaganda machine took over, and we convinced everyone that these crude radiological devices dropped after Japan had already been seeking to surrender unconditionally had been what had won the war. Truth was inverted in the usual manner: we had to destroy cities of women and children and old people in order to save lives, etc. “Atoms for Peace” became our rallying cry as we infinitely stockpiled new generations of improved A-bombs and then H-bombs. We weren’t the perpetrators of atrocity because we were the very opposite of that, a peace-loving people willing to do whatever to create a future world of plentiful power. Nuclear peace, electricity too cheap to meter, became our self-righteous apology for our regime of terrorizing the entire planet. To obtain the cooperation of the utility corporations we legislated a secret tax subsidy — that they be released from almost all of the liability for any serious nuclear accidents. When the ground shifts and we are no longer important and we no longer have any need to lie to ourselves in this particular manner, reality will emerge from its cocoon of lies and will be seen as simple and obvious. Our history books will record this period in which we are now living as the period in which “Atoms for Peace” had for a time been the necessary cover story for the only nation ever to have bombed entire civilian cities into oblivion. It had made us seem virtuous rather than wicked during the period in which anyone cared whether we were seen as good or evil. The story told by the nuclear interveners is that they have not won yet because they have not yet come up with a persuasive argument against nuclear power, an argument persuasive enough to make citizens understand. The story is that as soon as they come up with this persuasive argument and convince advocates of nuclear power that this has all been one big mistake, all the nuclear power plants will have to shut down and we’ll be oh so safe. I don’t credit that story because there already exists such a totally persuasive argument, and it’s a simple one. What it is, is, it’s an explanation of the danger and expense that would carry the day for any reasonable person. The fact of the matter is, however, that the nuclear protesters are prevented from deploying such a totally persuasive and simple argument! They are prevented because of what they are — they’re protesters. Perpetuation of our dangerous situation is not only the legitimation of the intervener, it is his and her bliss. Such protest is for them a way of life, a manner of being. Without being feckless opponents of nuclear power, they’d be HDT WHAT? INDEX MEN ON THE MOON ICBMS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE nothing — if they won hands down there’d be nothing left to enable them to present themselves as the righteous and knowing ones! What is this totally persuasive and simple argument that is being ignored because it would shut down all the nuclear power plants, that I referred to in the above paragraph? I’m going to tell you right now. I’m going to give it to you straight and simple. “Atoms for Peace” is an American national project that originated after the “Little Boy” U235 gun-mechanism bomb we had constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee was dropped onto the undamaged city of Hiroshima at approximately 8:15AM (Japan Standard Time) on August 6, 1945 and 3 days later at 11:02AM the “Fat Man” Pu239 implosion-mechanism bomb that we had constructed in Hanford, Washington, intended for the undamaged city of Kokura, Japan, was dropped instead onto the undamaged city of Nagasaki. Comparing the blast results of these 2 distinct devices, produced by our 2 distinct weapons programs, was what was going to enable us to decide which of our 2 production facilities to close at the end of the war as our spending began to wind down. Unfortunately, due to defects in the firing mechanisms, neither bomb went off like an atomic bomb — going off instead like the kind of “prompt criticality” that can easily occur as a nuclear power plant melts down. However, when President Eisenhower needed a cover story in order to generate public support for taxation to keep our atomics agenda alive, he was able to initiate his “Project Plowshare” to (among other things) detonate a string of atomic devices deep underground, blasting a channel across Nicaragua connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific — something nicknamed our “Pan-Atomic Canal.” When it became clear that such earthmoving projects were far too radioactive ever to be realizable, we fell back on our cover story “electrical energy too cheap to meter.” –For what better excuse for the guilt of our continuation of atoms for war could there be (I ask you) than pride that what we were going to use them for was peace? The problem with this was radioactivity — our electric utilities were far too conscious of the enormous liability they were going to incur in the inevitable eventual major accident at a privately owned fission nuclear power plant, and they were wisely unanimously refusing to fund such a dream.