|
Dear Editor,
In thousands of city
squares throughout the country there are monuments
to war. There are generals on
their horses, with sabers
in their hands, urging men to give up their lives.
There are thousands of canons,
waiting to be fired.
This indicates one thrust of thinking in the United
States. Instead, there should be
monuments to peace so
that everybody realizes what our true objectives should
be. These are not the
thoughts of a wide-eyed
radical. I worked at the Lawrence Livermore Lab for
17 years. While I came here
to work on Project Plowshare,
a program for putting atomic energy to peaceful uses;
when it ran out of
funds, I worked on the
design of nuclear weapons. I have never disagreed
with the objective of self-defense.
What I do disagree with
is the continual push for overkill capacity. Knowing
that the U.S. can wipe out
every person on earth
ten times over does not make me feel more secure.
I urge the residents of this city to
give serious thought
to their city square and to their aims in life, and
erect a monument to peace, not war.
Sincerely,
Leon Smith
Livermore, California
|
