March 21, 2011
I grew up about 85 miles from Three Mile Island and then hopped around the country before briefly landing back in rural Pennsylvania about six years ago under the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant’s ominous shadow. This part of rural PA was prettier than anyone who’s ever been to urban PA could imagine, except for those twin toxic monsters dominating the skyline like fat elephant trunks reaching up from below the Earth to suck all the life out of the air. Despite the quaint cobblestone streets and the ivy-covered colonial buildings and the happy, innocent, gurgling creeks, those nuclear towers overshadowed everything.
Roughly around the same time I was living out there, the Limerick plant employed Sharif Mobley, who also worked at four other nuclear plants in the Northeast before moving to Yemen and allegedly joining al-Qaeda.
It’s unknown whether Mobley shared his knowledge of these five plants” perimeter security with his militant Yemeni brethren. What’s beyond question is that Islamist terrorists, spurred on by their stupid, angry, violent, easily insulted and emotionally immature God, have repeatedly expressed interest in using nuclear terrorism to slay the infidel West. Way back in 1987, Iran was threatening to attack American nuclear reactors. Osama bin Laden reportedly received visits from two high-ranking Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission scientists prior to 9/11. Al-Qaeda has been jibber-jabbering about causing an “American Hiroshima” for years. Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al Fahd issued a fatwa justifying the use of nuclear weapons against the West. There have been reports of American nuclear-plant blueprints being discovered in Afghani militant hideouts and of British atomic-plant diagrams being found in a car associated with the 2005 London bombings. Pakistani militants have already attacked three nuclear facilities in their own country, with a largely unreported 2008 assault leading to 70 deaths.
From 1970-1999, the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism tabulated 167 “terrorist incidents involving a nuclear target.” The Union of Concerned Scientists has listed more than 120 attempted acts of sabotage at US nuclear plants, mostly by disgruntled employees. Fourteen years after its infamous near-meltdown, Pennsylvania’s hapless Three Mile Island facility suffered a 1993 attack by a mentally ill man who crashed the fences with his mother’s station wagon before entering the turbine building and evading authorities for hours. And a Project On Government Oversight study of 150 American nuclear-plant security guards found that most of them had zero confidence they could repel a sudden terrorist attack and were mostly concerned with finding a good hiding place should such an incident occur.
Islam isn”t the only potential threat here; picture it as merely one deformed baby amid a squalling nursery of mangled Chernobyl infants. Wherever radioactive material collides with malignant sociopathy, you”ll find sadists using it to harm and kill. There are reports of East German, Bulgarian, and Cuban communist authorities using X-rays to purposely induce cancer in political prisoners. And evidence points to Vladimir Putin’s henchmen as the culprits who administered polonium-210 to Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, killing him.
The crisis in Japan may or may not be over. Most news coverage has switched to the Western coalition attack on Libya, which still owns 1,000 metric tons of uranium yellowcake and is ruled by a man nutty enough to smear the Crusaders’ faces in it.
Upon viewing the first A-bomb explosion light up the dark New Mexico sky in 1945, Manhattan Project supervising physicist Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He hadn”t opened Pandora’s box so much as he forever locked homo sapiens inside Pandora’s gas chamber. Humanity was smart enough to develop nuclear technology but nowhere near emotionally mature enough to handle it responsibly. And these days it may only require one socially awkward hacker or a single maladjusted postdoctoral physics scholar to set the chain reaction going. It’s as easy as alpha, beta, gamma. You can”t paint a happy face on a mushroom cloud. Whether or not you believe in original sin, nuclear technology may be the final sin.
