Letters To The Editor
US should look closer for WMD
At the height of the Cold War, the United States had 32,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had 35,000. So right now, the number of weapons that both the Soviet Union and the United States have on alert ready to be launched combined is maybe between 2000 and 2500. So, to go from 60,000 to 2,500, you know 8,000 to 10,000, is a huge achievement; but there needs to be much greater reductions.
When the U.S. dropped more than 72 million litres of poisonous chemicals in Vietnam, or in Laos where there are millions of unexploded cluster bombs littering the countryside, left over from U.S. raids, or in Cambodia or Korea. Or, if they're interested in more recent WMD, the weapons inspectors could check out Afghanistan, where the U.S. left behind some 500 to 600 tons of depleted uranium, or Iraq itself, where there's several times that much, causing cancer, birth defects and deaths in both countries.
A little closer to home, if the U.S. wants to dig up even more WMD, it could go down to its former firing ranges in Panama where it left at least 100,000 bombs and artillery rounds strewn across more than 7,000 acres, as well as mustard gas bombs that they dropped and forgot about during decades of chemical weapons tests there. So if the U.S. is really interested in weapons of mass destruction, it can find plenty that it left behind itself in its wars or on its former military bases!
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