SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO
& VOCAB
“The test code-named ‘Trinity’ took place on July 16 [1945]. It exploded with a force equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty [author’s note: and cheerfully kill his relatives in battle]: 'I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.'" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX65.html
Lighter-than-air
(LTA) transport opens up fascinating possibilities. Dirigibles can provide heavy cargo lift with
minimal fuel consumption. Flying
cross-country in surprising comfort and at interesting altitudes,
passengers might watch the landscape unfold below at a leisurely pace (say 80
MPH). LTA ships can offload anywhere a modest tower would afford minimal
clearance. Many airports – with their
problems of noise, pollution and real estate wastage – could be
consolidated and removed to distant deserts.
During the Great
Paroxysm, a German Zeppelin overflew thousands of miles of enemy
territory. Its crewmen intended to bring
ten tons of war supplies to their countrymen marooned in German Central
Africa. They never made that
delivery. Flying over the North African
coast, they intercepted a bogus radio call that their troops had
surrendered. Fully loaded, the Zeppelin
returned non-stop to Central Europe.
LTA is a
glass-jawed technology. It presents
large, slow and unarmored targets to ground fire, fighter interception,
sabotage and bad weather. Its only practical weapons application was
escorting American coastal convoys against Nazi submarines. No dirigible-escorted convoy lost a
ship during the war, despite the massacre of unescorted coastal shipping during
the year prior.
The US Navy
deployed strategic dirigibles equipped with self-docking fighter aircraft. Strategic LTA was abandoned during its
prototype stage, in the 1930’s, just before the Greater Paroxysm. American
battleship admirals ordered the world’s finest airships, their advocate
commanders and magnificent crews to fly into hurricanes. Such storms wrecked first-rate warships from
both sides’ Navies, before and during the Pacific War. No admiral would have dared penetrate those
storm clouds with precious airplanes.
Officials of the
British Ministry of the Air (with visions of Spitfires gleaming in its eyes)
did one better. They dispatched the
dirigible R101 to India, even though it was so poorly designed it could
barely lift its own weight. After its
inevitable crash in a storm, they publicized the disaster so loudly that the
popular outcry allowed them to quietly ground the prototype R100 (a much better
design) and then scrap the entire British dirigible program with hardly any
opposition. Rarely have so few done so
much harm to so many.
Peace technicians
could find better uses for LTA. The
military liabilities that made American admirals and British bureaucrats throw
them away are largely irrelevant under peacetime conditions. Modern
fabrication and weather forecasting techniques increase LTA safety
tremendously. Fireproof helium inflation
and modern engineering techniques eliminate hazards posed by gasbags filled
with explosive hydrogen. The Hindenburg’s gasbag, for example, was
doped with silver-colored paint that turned out to be high explosive. Lighter
materials and new construction techniques promise much stronger vessels.
Let’s hope we
junk all those techno-monstrosities like civilianized strategic bombers,
supersonic ozone depleters and Main Battle Tank transports. Multi-hundred-ton aircraft wouldn't rake the
skies so often with contrails of sewage, waste fuel and combustion
by-products. The stratosphere – once cloudless and now foggy and seared with
recent surges of ultra-violet – might be allowed to heal. With our skies turned peaceful once again,
majestic, helium-filled sky sculptures could make a spectacular comeback.
Another
suggestive technology is WIG or Wing-in-Ground flying boats. Under the direction of Rostislav Y. Alexeiev, the Soviets built in great secrecy one
hundred plus ton Ekranoplans that
skimmed the surface of the sea. Relying
on surface-effect lift, they carried enormous payloads across vast distances. Their cruising speeds ran as high as 500 KPH
(300 MPH) at very low altitude (20 meters).
In other words, below most radar scans.
Fuel consumption turned out to
be exceptionally low. Once the craft had
speeded up to velocities at which the surface-effect took hold, the drag
that slows conventional aircraft was reduced.
This technology promotes enormous machines since they benefit most from
the surface effect.
As usual, these
craft were deployed as weapon systems first.
Prototypes were designed to deliver ship-killing missiles or a
large number of troops and armored vehicles overseas. They were fully amphibious. They could fly across flat terrain (beaches,
deserts and snow/ice fields) as easily as across calm waters (with less than
ten foot waves). Settled on the surface
of a body of water, they became extremely shallow-draft vessels.
Today, such
transports could carry massive freight payloads or many tourists. The idealist Alexeiev intended his Ekranoplans to fulfill those peaceful
tasks in the first place.
Getting back to lighter-than-air
craft, they could also serve as first stage boosters for space payloads. Large dirigibles could lift heavy space
vehicles into the stratosphere and then release them to fire up their own
rocket boosters at thirty thousand feet.
Basically we'd replace the giant first-stage rocket packs we're used to,
with a little more payload in a smaller launch package. We’ve already perfected post-launch direction
finding with cruise missiles and fighter ejection seats. Rockets
launched from dirigibles would be cheaper, safer and more ecologically sound
than payloads hurled from sea level by the brute force of exploding
chemicals.
I’m grateful to
Doug Dean for this idea—among many more we shared before his regretted
demise.
This technology
was never adopted. The basic goal of
weapon space programs is to loft nuclear weapons from concrete silos at an
instant’s notice and incinerate vast cities or smack pinpoint targets, like
enemy missile silos, at intercontinental removes. Giant
balloons just won’t fit the bill. So
much the better…
Nowadays, Dr. Daniel P. Raymer, President of the
Conceptual Research Corporation, is the lead designer of the Dynalifter
concept, a hybrid winged dynamic lifter and helium airship “successfully
combining the loitering capabilities of airships with the ground handling of
fixed-wing aircraft.” The Ohio Airships Company owns the conceptual
design and patent of its unique internal layout. You can find them at http://www.ohio-airships.com/OhioAirships/. I hope LEARNERS’ enthusiastic endorsement
does not jeopardize their marketing plans.
While lofting
low-orbit space payloads (and many other valuable civilian applications—think
of loitering search-and-rescue craft) would be within the Dynalifter’s
prospective capabilities, this project is proposed primarily as a
long-endurance weapon, strategic lift and surveillance platform. Why am I not surprised?
Just as LTA has
nothing but peace management potential in the long run, so nuclear and ‘hot’
fusion power plants have no legitimate function here and now. Nuclear power may perhaps serve a moon-based
industrial plant, but none here on Earth.
The problem with
nuclear energy is its universal appeal as a self-reinforcing weapon system and
its zero potential as a viable peace technology. Face
it. Whether by abrupt accident or long-term contamination, nuclear reactors
vomit torrents of radioactive filth across entire continents. Building a ‘safe’ nuclear reactor is like
designing a theft-proof bank or an unsinkable ship. Good luck trying.
Our bodies have
adapted to millions of years of constant background radiation. Over the past fifty years, this background
count has tripled due to clumsy accidents, mismanaged pollution and criminal
experiments. The depleted ozone
layer intensifies an electromagnetic blizzard that our bodies, raised under
pure Serengeti skies, were never designed to handle. The
human body is a raw-nerve recording instrument.
It’s a gyroscope, chronometer, oscilloscope, barometer, scintillation
counter, gravity meter and multi-band antenna of unmatched delicacy. Who knows what effects this multi-generation
bombardment may cause?
As far back as
the Joint Atomic Bomb Commission of 1945, both Dr. Averill A. Liebow, the chairman of that official body and
Dr. Alice Stewart, it’s most vocal dissident, protested that long-term,
low-level radiation could be just as harmful to humans as shorter, more intense
bursts of radioactivity.
The ideal resting place for radioactive isotopes is in the stable ore seams where we first dug them up. This sure beats lacing our air and water with them, and lodging them in baby fat at the top of the food chain. We can only hope this idea sinks in permanently and that pitchblende mining tails off. Current nuclear policy is suicide by slow poisoning.
The problem with “hot” fusion power, of course, is the
county-sized crater it could excavate explosively once it went critical and out
of control. Bets, anyone?
In the meantime,
we should improve global energy efficiencies, energy conservation and ‘soft’
power sources, (especially wind, tide and solar power). Windmills should carpet high-wind corridors,
and low-impact hydropower plants should dot every adaptable
waterway.
Overcapitalized
nuke and oil interests (weapon technicians on the march!) have quashed these
obvious alternatives for decades. Then
they’ve carefully subsidized their own nightmare technologies. Big surprise!
During the
Greater Paroxysm, multinational fascists hatched a plot to kill off entire
peoples whose birth certificates they considered improperly filled out. They executed their plot with little
interference from the Allies. Allied
bombers never attacked death camps and their train depots, even though
the rest of Europe was flattened nearly targetless. It will be interesting to list the few
strategic factories that were spared this near-universal fate in Germany, and
their international managers. Meanwhile, human prey were entrained to death
camps by the millions. There, large
concrete bunkers were filled with victims and then poison gas. With furious efficiency, the end
product was shoveled into crematoria.
Victims’ property was recycled to finance the Nazi war effort, (the dawn
of recycling).
These
all-too-human fascists discovered, however, that they could never make death
camps efficient enough. For some
reason, more victims always emerged than the technical means to dispose of
them. There were never enough sociopaths
available to guard and process them while they were being exterminated. So discouraging.
Nowadays, these
same brutes have arranged things so that they and their cronies will
occupy large, concrete, underground bunkers crammed with luxury tidbits and
survival necessities. Instead of poison
gas, they will breathe the purest air modern technology can filter. Once
everything is stylishly perfected, these conspirators plan to flood the
planet-turned-crematorium with a half-century’s output of the most expensive
omnicide toxins they could persuade their panicked victims/constituents to
bankroll. All those loathsome Others may
die en
masse on a planet
turned into Belsen—much more efficiently this time.
There’s been
plenty of empty talk about new world orders, and repeated flourishes of
ceremonious treaties… more diplomacy down the drain. There have been quite a few anti-nuke
protests. Global movements have
come and gone, condemning this ugly business.
Yet nothing serious has been
done to avert this TRULY Final Solution.
(“We mean it, this time!”).
Here is another
Learner obligation: cripple these satanic ministries and drive their minions
into well-deserved if involuntary retirement.
The threat of military omnicide swells every time another power group
comes online with nuclear, chemical, biological and meteorological weaponry. Every
time another nuke explodes, a snoozing Devil blinks.
It is only with
our mindless consent that such lunatics could turn this planet into Belsen or
threaten to do so. We must have been
sleepwalking to entrust our destiny to such ghouls. I would rather no such Damocles' sword
remained suspended over our heads by a hopeless jumble of military metaphors;
no man-made, man-worshipped apocalypse; none of that genocide hardware
perfectly coiled to strike. I would be
much happier with a less watertight corroboration of my thesis: that we are
weapon zombies hypnotized by weapon mentality, sleep-walking hand-in-hand into
Armageddon. Our blind submission to this nuclear nightmare confirms the deathlike
grip weapon mentality holds over the collective superconscience.
It’s up to
us to liberate ourselves. Which means
it's up to you. Yes, my friend, no one
but you!
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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