Will Columbia Disaster Embolden Nuclear Protesters

On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 01:08 PM, John Frazer wrote:

> No, I don't think fear of terrorists is a valid reason to stunt a
> science or a market application.

One should consider the vulnerabilities any new technology creates. In
the case of the current nuclear energy, there are great terrorist
targets all over the place in the form of fuel rods in 'temporary'
storage tanks.

> Show me a case where the
> USAF misplaced a nuclear warhead, and I'll show you a case
> where heads rolled, no damage was done, and the same
> mistake was not possible again.

Probably. However, there is a very legitimate concern that Soviet
warheads will fall into the wrong hands and be used to destroy one or
more US cities. If the US was to undergo a collapse similar to that
experienced by the Soviet Union (unlikely in the short term, but who
knows in 100 years?) the same problem would occur here.

One US collapse scenario: another virus appears just as SARS did a few
months ago. This one transmits as easily as the common cold (quite
plausible) and kills 80% of it's victims (a bit of a stretch, but
consistent with Small Pox in North American Indians). The US loses 200
million people in the course of 2 years and the economy essentially
disappears, traffic, however, is greatly improved. No one knows how
likely this scenario is, but SARS shows it's not at all impossible.

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.