Fearful despots endangering humanity

In the summer of 1975, I rode my bicycle from Iwakuni to Hiroshima, Japan, a distance of about 30 kilometers. Upon arriving, I was taken aback by the nearly total modernity of the entire city. There were no structures older than 30 years of age, except for the steel hulk of the former International Exposition Building, which sat at ground zero when the atomic bomb was dropped Aug. 6, 1945. I was a young Marine NCO at the time.

A museum sits on the site that documents the horror of that experience. I viewed what was left of a human skeleton fused to a piece of steel. I had a similar experience in Nagasaki in 1977. Little did I know at the time that I would live to experience my own radiological exposure.

Without getting into details, I was in the vicinity of the Chernobyl reactor circa April to May 1986, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. It took me nearly a year to recover from my acute exposure. I was then serving as a Navy CPO. The cumulative effect of my exposures resulted in an early USN 90% disability retirement in 1992.

To this day, there is a 1,000-square-kilometer habitation exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl reactor. Hundreds of sick and orphaned children from the region were shipped to Cuba for treatment and study by the University of Havana. Documentaries about this can be viewed on FSTV, LINK and PBS-TV. The Soviet helicopter pilots who dropped concrete to cap the reactor are now dead.

Human memories are short, but the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years. Nuclear arsenals today contain weapons that would make their World War II predecessors look like firecrackers. Modern breeder reactors create elements that are logarithmically more lethal than Plutonium-210. All radioactive elements are sourced from rare earth minerals, which are inherently in short supply. We are still arguing over where to store all of the spent toxic waste.

I do not fear my infirmities because the sacrifice was a necessity. Somebody had to do it. What does concern me are the despots driven to madness by their own fears. They are the ones who will hasten the end of humanity.

GERALD B. HIGGS

Bonners Ferry