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University of California designs technologies for nuclear holocaust

should the University of California be managing laboratories that design the latest technologies for nuclear holocaust?

Higher Learning: How to Blow Up the World, THE HUFFINGTON POST, Norman Solomon:, 6 August 2010, On my way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory a few years ago, I found it listed in a New Mexico phone book–under “University of California.”

Since the early 1940s, UC has managed the nation’s top laboratories for designing nuclear bombs. Today, California’s public university system is still immersed in the nuclear weapons business.

Sixty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the University of California imprimatur is an air freshener for the stench of preparations for global annihilation. Nuclear war planners have been pleased to exploit UC’s vast technical expertise and its image of high-minded academic purpose…………

Last spring, the White House announced plans for this decade that include investing $80 billion “to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex”–in addition to “well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems.”

In fact, the U.S. government is now on a jag to boost spending for its nuclear arsenal. As the Livermore-based organization Tri-Valley CAREs noted weeks ago, “the 2011 budget request for nuclear weapons is the largest in our nation’s history; bigger than under George W. Bush and a whopping 40 percent higher than the amount spent for nuclear weapons activities on average during the Cold War.”

Credit where due: the UC-managed laboratories for nuclear bombs have been on the cutting edge of digital advancement. Their record recalls a comment from Martin Luther King Jr., who noted the proliferation of “guided missiles and misguided men.”………..

For sure, there’s plenty of money sloshing around to reward the masters–and academic servants–of the nuclear weapons industry. But should the University of California be managing laboratories that design the latest technologies for nuclear holocaust?

Norman Solomon: Higher Learning: How to Blow Up the World

August 6, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear technology, nuclear weapons