CompuServe Thread

Oh, I agree, the cleanup's enormous, and that's true even for non-nuclear bases, since the military has never thought much about damage to the area. It's always been a fact that the defense industry, since the start of WWII at any rate, was a large blind for a massive socialist welfare program. It, not Roosevelt's programs, finally broke the U.S. out of the Depression, and by sustaining and fattening it over the years of the Cold War it became insurance against another. You might remember that this was Kennedy's second rationale for the space program: it would provide the same level of government social welfare as defense but do something positive, and was one of the very few things that defense workers with defense skills could adapt to. The idea that you can retrain a nuclear physicist to ecology or adapt a multi-warhead missile construction and testing corporation to making affordable housing is as laughable as expecting a brain surgeon to operate on your injured foot or a doctor of dental surgery to do bypass operations. Things are simply too specialized for that. Space and undersea exploration are the only two things the defense industry and its specialties could adapt to, and in this age of ignorance as a virtue they are dismissed as wastes of money. Hence, massive unemployment, much of it permanent, tax bases crumble, corporations go under, state economies teeter, and everybody blames everybody for it.