Letter to friends about Oak Ridge

Dear friends and family, below you will observe the text of a letter outlining my concerns about the building of a new Nuclear Bomb factory in Oak Ridge Tn. Several of us in Abingdon, Va. have visited the Oak Ridge facility several times to protest the building of this new facility along with the "modernization of all of our exiting nuclear weapons. This is being planned at a time that we are in serious financial trouble and having just signed a new treaty, obligating our country to work towards the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons' Please read this over and consider acting to protest this costly and insane program that our country is embarking on. Thanks.
Written by APEC member Tom Boyle

Forty years ago the United States signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, agreeing to negotiate "in good faith" the elimination of nuclear weapons. The New START treaty that passed the senate earlier this year is also a commitment to decrease our nuclear supply. In spite of these commitments, the National Nuclear Security Administration recently announced an increase in funding for the nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

On August 6th and 9th we commemorate the 66th anniversary of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's hard to understand why our government is using a "life extension program" to modify existing warheads, in some cases adding new military capabilities and making their intended use as much as thirty times more powerful than the bombs dropped in 1945.

In an article from the Wall Street Journal , March 2011, former cabinet members George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn argue for a world without nuclear weapons. "With the spread of nuclear weapons, technology, materials, and know-how, there is an increasing risk that nuclear weapons will be used." And they conclude, "It is clear that the U.S. and Russia - having led the nuclear buildup for decades - must continue to lead the build-down."

When a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami caused massive devastation at the Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan, more than 200,000 people were forced to evacuate from their homes and radioactive toxins now circle the globe, poisoning our water, soil, air, and contaminating the global food supply. Each of the 442 nuclear reactors in the US, besides continuing to generate tons of nuclear waste that will last for hundreds of thousands of years, is a potential Fukishima waiting to happen, either by force of nature, human error, or deliberate malice. The estimated 23,000 nuclear bombs on our planet are also subject to catastrophic accidental misuse, deliberate sabotage, or intentional use by some misguided government with an insane death wish.