Dears, Some may take it a bit amiss to post this on an agricultural list, but warfare always is the antithesis of good agriculture. As has been pointed out elsewhere, as any sociologist would say, mankind lives today as a global agrarian society. There are not that many ways of acquiring the kind of wealth an agrarian society requires to consider itself wealthy. 1. Best, to produce it through agriculture. 2. Second best, to inherit it or extract it from nature and use it in exchange for someelse's products of agriculture. 3. Worst, to acquire it through warfare.
As to the coming war? I don't think it makes sense for the US president to invade Iraq now and have it over with come election time. Besides I don't think Iraq is truly any threat as the US has bombed them after Desert Storm for over a decade, even while bombing Yugoslavia, when the US ran out of cruise missles for a bit. What might truly be a threat is Iran, which the US could not invade without a land army at its borders. So I think the rhetoric about Iraq's weapons is a slight of hand. It is Iran that has the most dangerous weapons and the hurry is all about getting an army in position before Iran uses them against Israel (and the Great Satan, Israel's protector, the US). That way a full scale war would be going on in Iran at election time. GW may be no genius, but he clearly isn't the brains behind this administration anyway. But there IS some real brains behind what is going on and I don't think they intend to lose their re-election as GWs daddy did previously. Just my opinion, and you can take it for what it is worth. But if North Korea seriously can be treated as no threat when they admit to having a few small, relatively clean, plutonium warheads (probably about the size of what went off under each of the World Trade Center towers but big and powerful enough to register over two on the Richter Scale) what can Iraq do? Well, Bush is not making much ado by calling folks' attention to Iraq's nuclear weapons efforts, which is another peculiar thing. And anthrax when loosed in the US proved a rather poor plague and the administration is taking smallpox more seriously because it is known to spread easily from person to person, unlike anthrax. Poison gas might be more of a threat in a place like Israel, but Iraq has no way of sending it to the US. So what does he have? And Iran is a known and staunch supporter of the Palestinian fight against Israel and still to this day calls the US the Great Satan. So what's one to think? --HL PS. If it seems incredible that there was no mention of nuclear fallout after the WTC towers went down, consider this. Plutonium 239 is purely an alpha particle emitter. This is what makes it capable of causing a chain reaction/explosion, and it is very good at that. U 235 takes 50 kilos to reach critical mass whereas plutonium 239 only requires 10 kilos. Alpha particles are helium nuclei, which are heavy particles with a double plus charge of 2. They pick up the two electrons within inches of their emission. Thus they become helium gas and are virtually absorbed when emitted without any detectable radiation. It is gamma emitters that Geiger counters and similar radiation detection devices detect. The only such particles left from such a blast would have resulted from the small amount of the 10 kilos of plutonium that actually fissioned before the chain reaction blew itself apart enough the reaction ceased being critical--as not all that much of the plutonium fissions before the reaction mass expands enough to cease reacting. Thus what is known as a clean nuclear warhead. The vaporized plutonium left in the residues of dust and smoke after the blast are virtually indetectable by anything except a mass spectrograph. Yet it is extremely toxic if inhaled before its heavy, heavy particles settle, as was the smoke and dust from the collapse of the towers. I'm sure the toxicity of the dust and smoke was no coincidence and was unexplained by the materials the buildings were built of. And whoever detonated the pocket plutonium bombs in the basements of each tower is keeping mum. But get a copy of the tapes of the buildings' collapses and watch it. Consider there was no structural steel left sticking out above the rubble even though such beams are driven into bedrock and joined continuously to the tops of such buildings. Not your classic collapse but rather a classic demolition. --HL Visit our website at: www.unionag.org
