🚀 go-pugleaf

Bradley Richards writes:

> Thom, you also say "is there anyone who doesn't realize that the Gulf
> War is also an enormous weapons testing research project.  We are told
> about the successes, what about the failures?"  Now, there's no doubt
> that the military and the contractors are paying very close attention to
> how well different weapons systems are working--they'd be foolish not
> to.  But your implication that this is the reason (or even *a* reason)
> to go to war is uncalled for.

This is not uncalled for.  Years ago I worked on a piece regarding
Hiroshima.  In the process of doing the show I discovered -- in public
libraries -- that a major reason for dropping the Atomic bomb was as a
research project.  The biggest stumbling block was where to drop the
bomb.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not good research sites for a
quantitative test site because they are flat.  If you really want to
test the bomb you want a good valley or bowl shape -- just like Kyoto,
the religious center of Japan.  This was considered a good site because
it was bowl like -- the fact that it had no significant military sites
and it was a religious center had little meaning for many of the
decision makers.  Luck and common sense will win out -- some say !!

I was not suggesting that we went to war to test weapons, I was
suggesting that this becomes a good test site for 'testing new weapons'

> ... Iraq portrayed that [bombed] village as an example of the kind of 
> indiscriminate bombing that they claim we are doing.  But I'd lay odds 
> that there was a military target of some sort in that village ...

This was the same reasoning which suggested that the baby food factory
could have been used for chemical weapons testing after the designers of
the factory from New Zealand said that it was a baby food factory.

Thom Gillespie