Testimony against a new Hydrogen Bomb Factory

Overcoming rain and interstate blockages, two teenagers' testimony
supplemented that of 10 from WNC at the Department of Energy's Nov. 17
hearing in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The 12 opposed our government's proposed
new $3.5 billion H-bomb factory. Despite Obama's avowal to phase out
nuclear weapons, our militarists endorse a sustained global arms race
for another century.

Unless we on Main Street stop the military-industrial complex, it will,
through the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration, build the new bomb plant at Y12 in Oak Ridge, an act
likely to provoke unprecedented global nuclear-weapons proliferation.

Working to prevent extreme environmental degradation for which there is
no cure, Western North Carolina Physicians for Social Responsibility is
a medical and public-health voice working to prevent the greatest
environmental threats to human existence, specifically the use or
spread of nuclear weapons, and working to slow, stop and reverse global
warming and the toxic degradation of the environment.

On April 5 in Prague, President Obama told the world that the United
States was prepared to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons.
The president offered several steps, including ratification of the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In addition, the president is negotiating with Russia for new
nuclear-weapons reductions, and the U.S. is preparing a new Nuclear
Posture Review.

The United States is at the brink of either, 1) promoting nuclear
proliferation by continuing the present status quo course that we have
been pursuing for 60 years, or 2) demonstrating our resolve to seize
the opportunities to renew and strengthen commitments to treaties to
which we have agreed, but with which we have not been in compliance.
Over the next few months, our executive and legislative branches will
have perhaps one last opportunity to reduce the risks of nuclear
disaster by carrying through on arms-reduction negotiations with Russia
and other nations and on good-faith negotiations to solidify the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

It would be globally dangerous for the United States to construct the
proposed facility, which would produce secondaries and other
nuclear-weapons components that would reverse these opportunities and
signal to the rest of the world that we guarantee our weapons will be
capable of inhumanely killing millions of people, mostly innocent
civilians, for the next 100 years. Such would be a colossal
environmental disaster, catastrophically affecting the health and lives
of all earth's inhabitants.

For more information: http://www.stopthebombs.org. You may challenge
continued production of nuclear weapons in Oak Ridge by responding to
the Draft Y12 Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement by sending
comments to: LY12sweis.comments@tetratech.com before Jan. 29, 2010.

- Lewis E. Patrie, Chair, WNC Physicians for Social Responsibility