The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Chapter 5: The Parable of the Green Fool

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"Someone in the crowd said to him, “Liberal, tell my brother to divide the tax money with my solar power company.”

"¹⁴ Comrade Stalin replied, “Individuals, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Can't you tell I have the general will to look out for...” ¹⁵ Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; you might turn in to a conservative! But for now you're just a useful idiot...”

¹⁶ And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain country yielded an abundant economic harvest. ¹⁷ He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no way to prevent the world from changing.’

¹⁸ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my coal power plants and build bigger solar panels across miles of beautiful, open Desert, and there I will have my electricity. ¹⁹ And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of power laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

²⁰ “But the general will, now extended to include the cute, furry creatures of the forest, said to him, ‘You fool! Yellowstone will erupt this very night, cover the Western United States with lava and block the sun for 50 years. Then where will this stable world you have prepared for yourself go to?’

²¹ “This is how it will be with whosoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards the general will."

California Nightmares

The Delta Smelt, Work of USFWS, public domain

It seems, not long ago, the world dreamed of California - its gold, its industrial power, its great cities and farmland. Today, the state is in massive debt, farmers are strangled of water for a 2-inch fish, unprecedented regulation strangles every aspect of innovation and industry, the notion of private property becomes less and less meaningful, and unemployment in the once-fertile Central Valley skyrockets to over 50% in some places. Worse, it seems somewhere down the road California lost its soul, as even where business is still strong, it is driven by people from out of the state.

What we find today is a coastal California more interested in complaining about insensitive jokes in the film "Juno" then building business or making things work, and an inland California slowly being sacrificed at the altar of a fish. We find a state legislature that refuses to cut spending or authorize new industry, preferring instead to bleed their state dry with taxes as fat cat administrators take home six-figure salaries. We find a constitution with specific language banning an entire industry, nuclear power, and communities that plot to prevent new industrial development because they're scared for their land values, while factory after factory shuts down. We find a state that has totally lost touch with who or what built it, and a new race of man who not only does not know how to provide for himself, but refuses to, preferring instead to take and take and take and finding building too ugly for his tastes.

Perhaps most disgusting about California is the absolute willingness of the people on the coast to annihilate the welfare of the rest of the state, and that brings us to the point of this blogpost. A plan needs to be made to protect the people of the rest of the state from the coasters. What the coasters do to themselves is their own problem - I hope someday they will learn, but if they don't at least I won't be responsible for it. They must, however, not be able to destroy all of this land that has never agreed with them or signed on to what they do.

It seems most rational to cut California in to 4 states, so as to create as logical of a configuration as possible and best serve the needs of the people. A proposal already exists for the state of Jefferson, and for the Southeastern desertlands. For the Central Valley in between, I propose creating the somewhat historic land of American River corresponding to the area that the Spanish authorized for American settlement in the early 1800's and the famous river named for that event. In addition, I took the liberty of including conservative Orange County in the proposed "South California" (here renamed "Mojave") state. This way, the Coasters can be stupid in peace. We'll even give them a stretch of coastal wilderness, west of the Santa Lucias.

public domain

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

Bring in the Creditors!

Photobucket

One of the greatest problems with government worker unions is the lack of a check on power. In private business, unions can never extort too much out of customers, shareholders, and owners because the company must at least break even to continue paying them, but in government, as just happened with the 66% increase in income tax in Illinois, the ability to tax and extort the people allows union power to grow unchecked. That's why Hailing from Georgia is giving the following proposal of Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich two thumbs up:

First, as with municipal bankruptcy, it would have to be completely voluntary. This means that neither the federal government nor state creditors could push an unwilling state into bankruptcy, no matter how catastrophic the state's finances may be, as this would violate the U.S. Constitution's protection for a state's sovereign immunity.

Second, as with municipal bankruptcy, a new bankruptcy law would allow states in default or in danger of default to reorganize their finances free from their union contractual obligations. In such a reorganization, a state could propose to terminate some, all or none of its government employee union contracts and establish new compensation rates, work rules, etc. The new law could also allow states an opportunity to reform their bloated, broken and underfunded pension systems for current and future workers. The lucrative pay and benefits packages that government employee unions have received from obliging politicians over the years are perhaps the most significant hurdles for many states trying to restore fiscal health.

Third, the new law should allow for the restructuring of a state's debt and other contractual obligations. In a voluntary bankruptcy scenario, states, like municipalities, will have every incentive to file a reorganization plan that protects state bondholder claims and their ultimate recovery. States will evaluate their future access to bond markets and their prospective borrowing rates as they formulate the optimal restructuring plan. (LA Times)

Now states, like private industry, will have a genuine check on union power - the ability to eradicate their arrangements if negotiations bring them to the point of bankruptcy! And just like in private bankruptcy, it can be challenged in court if states are abusing the system. Not state courts though...

This is probably not going to work for the Federal Government, which has no singular higher authority to turn to for such dispute resolution, and so we recommend that this motion be accompanied by a BAN on federal unionization.

This conclusion is from the facts. The facts show two things: 1) unions in government work every bit as bad in practice as they do in economic theory, as the recent affairs of California and Greece attest to, and 2) municipal bankruptcy, which has been an option for cities, counties, and towns since the 1930's, has helped many a municipality, from NYC in 1975* to Orange County in 1994, to fix their affairs. In fact, in Orange county, the restructuring was so successful that they were able to repay 100% of the principal without raising taxes a dime, while instituting useful reforms to prevent a rehash of the events (ERisk):

The new Orange County investment policy statement establishes safety of principal, and liquidity, as the primary objectives of the fund, with yield as a secondary objective. More specifically it prohibits borrowing for investment purposes (ie, leverage), reverse repurchase agreements, most kinds of structured notes (such as inverse floaters) and derivatives such as options. The same document bans the treasury oversight committee and other designated employees from receiving gifts, and obliges them to disclose economic interests and conflicts of interest. The county treasurer now has to submit monthly reports to the investors and other key county officers that contain sufficient information to permit an informed outside reader to evaluate the performance of the investment programme.

Now it is true that for munie investors, who will now see their risk in investment substantially increased, this isn't 100% a good deal. However, this too in the end is probably a good thing, as it makes selling government debt much more difficult, requiring higher interest, and will thus discourage state governments from running their bills so high to begin with in the future. Sorry munies, but we have bigger responsibilities then investors who, whether they knew it or not, volunteered to take a chance. It's time to bring in the creditors, and with them, bankruptcy court!

*Note: NYC did not actually declare bankruptcy. Rather, mayor Abraham Beame, used the threat of it to coaxe a overextended teachers union to invest 150 million of its pension funds in municipal bonds. He then acquire a large loan from the federal government. Not long after, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani began confronting NYC's debt problems, and largely solved them, and the days of over extension by NYC municipal unions were largely over for decades. (NY Times)

Barbara Boxers Top Ten Countdown

There are certain kinds of people in this world who just bring something special in to your life. People who dance, people who sing, people who love you and people who say they love you to sexually exploit you and drink your blood as you realize you've been betrayed and are now food for an undead fantasy creature, and then there's Senator Barbara Boxer. Without her, who would make the Senate exciting? Who would make it interesting? Who would make us laugh and cry at the same time? Let us celebrate the 10 greatest moments of Barbara Boxers California Dream.

10. Argumentus Ad Hominim Maximus after (mostly) serious questioning by a very angry Midwesterner:



9. Ask the President what her job is:



8. Keep the bleat of the news:



7. WRITE A NOVEL! (No, this is not satire.)



6. Be the fashion police and whine at the same time:



5. Make a cheesy, melodramatic speech in front of a polar bear picture:



4. Compare Abortion to Male Reproductive Health:



3.Watch Senator Boxer talk down to an American Military Officer:



2.Then refuse to apologize for it! (I apologize for the added captions - I couldn't find a pure unadultered version of this particular video.)



1.And just when you thought absolutely nothing could beat what you saw, have we got a surprise for you!

The official photo of my favorite senator. Public Domain.

Update 11/4/2010: For those of you who haven't heard, our favorite senator from the land of fruits and nuts will be around to entertain us a little while longer. Maybe she'll write another novel this time.

Public Domain from the Open Clipart Library

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Episode 2: Parable of the fruits and the nuts

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"And when the Republican Candidate for Governor of California comes, on the second of November, carried on the backs of lobbyists and wearing a tacky turtleneck sweater, she will divide the Californians, and in her bowl will be the fruits, and in her mouth will be the nuts.

"And she shall sayeth to the fruits as they look on in their simply fabulous sunglasses while their gay partner holds their hand and massages their left shoulder, "curse you oh fruits, for I was hungry, and you cancelled my welfare checks, I was naked, and you let me escape prison for streaking, I was in the hospital, and you cut my Medicaid, I was in prison, and you caused the prison library to be sold to Half Price Books."

"But Meg Whitman, when did we do any of these things to you?"

"Assuredly I say to you, when you overspent at the ballot box, you did it to me."

"Then she shall sayeth to the nuts as they hold their combined King James Bible and AK-47 maintenance manual, "curse you oh nuts, for I was trying to break the strikes, and you stopped me, I was trying to lower taxes, and you increased them, I was trying to build a fence on the border, and you turned the ground in to quicksand."

"But Meg Whitman, when did we do any of these things to you?"

"Assuredly I say to you, when you made yourselves look ridiculous, you made me look ridiculous."

"And then everyone, including Meg Whitman, shall inherit a hell called modern day California. There shall be 20% unemployment rates and a considerable number of ruined political careers, and even the wild animals shall consider them an abhorrence and a disgrace."

The California Compromise

Vitrification, a common nuclear waste disposal technique. Image is public domain.

California is a catch-22. The USA already has serious economic problems, with unemployment now over 10% and allowing the destruction of Americas most populous state is only going to make this problems worst. On the flip side, if we do help them, it may encourage both them and other states to fail and get bailed out just like California did.

We have another major problem, energy. We do severe damage to our ecology, our air quality and our public health through the excessive use of coal in power plants. The more orthodox alternative energy sources -wind, solar, geothermal- are decades from being truly practical in the majority of locales, and would all require heavy subsidies. Many companies have already lined up to build nuclear reactors, even willing to pay to lobby for the right to do so, despite a horrific level of regulation and a public relations nightmare with the common voting public. Far from needing subsidies, they'll spend much additional capital beyond the market price to build these facilities in our country.

The inevitable question is, what about the waste? Yucca mountain would have been an ideal site, but politically, the people of Nevada have fought too well against it and the project is now dead in the water. There are deserts in California very similar to those in Nevada, and California needs us.

The less obvious question, but one every bit as important: who wants to live next to a reactor? Most states outside of the Southeast are not willing to allow Nuclear Construction, and Western states like Nevada, Arizona and Oregon are very far from the Southeast. I've also heard that California is a huge energy importer...

In addition, California has resisted allowing oil-drilling off their coasts. Beyond the humiliation factor, this would lower oil prices and boost domestic production, relieving our dependence on the Middle East for oil and lowering prices. If you don't like lower prices, we could collect a tariff on foreign oil. The tariff revenue would also help pay for the California bailout, while the land royalties that California would be allowed to collect, just like Alaska, would help them avoid a new bailout.

We also need more oil refineries, preferably in places with good weather. Our current refineries are on the gulf coast and get hit by hurricanes all the time, and no state in America allows you to build new ones.

All these proposals would create jobs in California through lower energy costs, the introduction of new industries (including Oil, Oil Platform Servicing, Oil Refining, and Nuclear energy related manufacturing and research.)

So here's the deal: California gets a bailout alright, in fact, in entirety, but in exchange, they must 1) dispose of our nuclear waste, 2) build nuclear reactors to power their cities and stop buying up the excess power reserves of the American West, and 3) drill oil off their coast and 4) build oil refineries on Californias sunny hurricane-free coast.

Thus we get past our Catch-22 by being exploitive jerks and manipulating California in to being the optimal economic citizen of the United States of America.

I don't think anyone will want a bailout after this!

Classic American Cities - Los Angeles

Photo by Nseranno under CC ShareAlike 3.0

I don't know exactly when the story of Los Angeles began, but I know it is mentioned in Richard Dana's classic seafaring account "Two years before the mast." He said that in 1835, just as in today, it was the largest pueblo in California, and just like it's later incarnation, it was a sprawled out city of lengthy roads from many ranches and farms. Now, in the 1850's it would be briefly surpassed by San Francisco, but once again, as cities do find their natural place, it's brilliant position at the meetings of many valleys and where the coast bends from it's Southernly trejectory on the California coast, and it's place near many mountain passes, made it again the hub of California and the Southwest.

This map courtesy of Federal Government, public domain, 1920.

The history of modern Los Angeles starts with the red cars, in 1901. This 1920 map shows the extent of the red cars then through Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties. They carried workers from the suburbs to work and beachcombers from inland areas to the shoreline. As hard as it is to believe, traffic was actually heaviest on the weekends!

Back then, Los Angeles, with its many dispersed centers, was a place that was not so built up in one spot that an ordinary working family could not afford their own home with a view of mountains or shoreline, and the moderately wealthy could afford ocean front. It was this setting of supreme suburban spoiling that gave us "I Love Lucy."

Public Domain, courtesy of Wikicommons, Location Santa Monica, CA

Few cities are defined by trees, but the palm-lined boulevards of Los Angeles seem to call to a vision much higher, dragging it down to earth and defining a city. They speak of paradise.

One great irony of Los Angeles is that it's name means "City of the Angels," and yet is associated with the most libertine of social liberalisms. Yet this stereotype has very little truth to it. Although the city itself is very religiuosly disorganized (few cities are otherwise), Orange County to the East of LA is probably one of the most christianized parts of the US, and certainly the West.

Courtesy of Jon Sullivan. Released Public Domain.

Different parts of Los Angeles grew with different businesses: the growth of San Bernardino (according to "Fast Food Nation") came largely from heavy industry and steel, Pasadena grew with advanced science and technology (the JPL and CalTech), Orange County & Long Beach grew with the oil industry, and Hollywood, oh Hollywood. Hollywood was once just a sleepy suburb outside of the city, and now, in the minds of most, it defines it. And what a wild place too, whooey, the way those guys dress! I remember my friend Andy coming back from Los Angeles with a fur around his neck and a leather jacket. Granted, he went to Acting School, but still! This town grew up as the result of the foolishness of film producers in New York City, driving their folks westward.

It seems that when Los Angeles does well Hollywood does well (1940's-1970's), then things fall apart, it crashes (1980's), comes back again when the films improve (1990's), and crashes once again (late 2000's).

Palm trees in place, we enter 1940 and the completion of the Arroyo Seco Parkway:

Courtesy of Diane Kane of Caltrans. Public domain.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway was the first freeway built in California, and was an immediate hit. It greatly reduced travel time from Pasadena to Los Angeles, linking the two cities further, though today, just like the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, another very old but shorter freeway (1926), it is considered outdated with narrow lanes and sharp turns.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway did so well that in 1947, instead of extending the existing rail system, Caltrans built a freeway grid to expand their infrastructure. The level of freedom granted by automobiles and the prosperity created by a system that worked well for quite some time soon made LA a model for many other cities, and CalTrans a primary advisor to many state transportation boards. All their freeways are named, names like Ventura Freeway, Santa Monica Freeway, San Bernardino Freeway, and Ronald Reagan Freeway. This particular tradition is now fading, though, as many of these freeways are now simply referred to by their numbers (the 10, 22 freeway, et cetera.)

The red cars are no longer with us. Those freeways were so successful that there was no one left to ride those red cars - they were riding their own cars, sometimes even to their mailboxes!

Two American Presidents have come from Los Angeles, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (and unlike ole' Jimmy, both were 2-term.) Nixon grew up in Orange County not long after the red cars arrived. Ronald Reagan grew up in the Midwest and then moved there to become a movie star. Ironically though, Ronald Reagan in many ways represents the values of Orange County better then Richard Nixon did, though Tricky Dick represented them a little better then most people realize.

Public Domain. Courtesy of Michael Price.

Today, Los Angeles is suffering through a hard time. It's middle-class, once the envy of the nation, is being ground to nothing against three millstones: unemployment, government debt, and housing costs. It's crime level, although now improving, is still among the worst in the nation. It's skies are polluted, and it's age-old optimism wanes to zilch. The transportation grid that was once an example to all of America is now America's most congested, and most "solutions" have been too draconian (usually involving tolls) to truly provide relief. Some say LA's narcissism and pride have finally caught up with it, but I think there's still some spirit there. Besides, the bad blood will leave first, leaving the good blood to rebuild. Let us all pray for the city of Angels.

The Problem with Nuclear Disarmament

Photo: Trinity Test, 1945, US D.O.E. (Mannhattan Project)



In 1945, not long after testing this atomic bomb, America dropped dual nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, bringing to a swift end a war that the Japanese were planning to draw out for years. With these same bombs, it held down an expansionist and empowered Russia through the 40's, and created a culture of meek innocent dependency among all the other powers of the world, even England. When stable-headed Russia acquired it's own atom bomb, however, it was finally able to regain steam and act quickly to advance itself across the globe.

Now, America did not have the worst intentions. For the most part, after 4 long and bloody years of war, we just wanted peace. We were even willing to concede a little to both independence oriented peoples like the Fillipinos and expansionist empires like the Soviets, just so long as they realized we had Mr. Bang-Bang and thus fighting us was worthless; we did not wish to overuse this power, however.

And when the Soviets did acquire their own bomb, they were led by a bloodthirsty but levelheaded and slightly paranoid dictator named Joseph Stalin who realized -or at least agonized- that, even if he won a nuclear shell game against the US, he would be weakened by the fight and risk rebellion or China.

Now, let's switch roles here. Let's say that, instead of the US acquiring an atom bomb, it had been Germany. They would've tested it over Isreal, London, Moscow or New York and then imposed their will on the nations they were fighting. Even if some of the Western powers continued to fight, one of them submitting would have guaranteed a much bloodier, lenghtier conflict at the least, and chances are that the additional length would have made it possible for Hitler to build yet more bombs.

Let's switch another role. The US still made the atom bomb, but instead of cool as gun-steel Stalin at the helm, you had a hot-tempered dick like Ahmnehjahd. The US finds out that they have atom bombs, and instead of standing back and saying, "yeah, they figured us out, it's time for round two," he says, "start the countdown."

The best possible outcome of no nuclear weapons is exactly what happened before, with a single, selfish or desperate nation (preferably desperate) acquiring a nuclear weapon to threaten another nation, and a cool-headed second competitor outrunning them cooly and successfully.

The most likely outcome is global oppression. Nations willingly submit, just as they did to the US, but this nation is not as kind and had intentions far worse then anything in FDR's heart. A kind of globlal slavery ensues. The only separation between this and the best possible outcome is intention.

The worst possible outcome is the competitor acquires their competing weapon, is found out, does not react smoothly, and both nations launch, creating at the very least destruction of innocent life on a level beyond Darfur or Rwanda, at the worst, nuclear ahnillation of our species, all hinging on the effectiveness of production.

Mankind has already cheated nuclear death once. Please, Mr. President, don't put humanity through this again.