FROM THAT PENTAGON DEATH STAR,
AND THE UNIVERSITY THAT POISONED THE WORLD

By LEUREN MORET
April 24, 2006
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=2445, http://lonestaricon.com/2006/CurrentIssue/17/14guest.htm
Two images changed my life when I visited the Peace Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 2000, on my first trip to Japan. I had worked as a geoscientist in two U.S. Nuclear weapons labs – Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab – but I never knew what a nuclear weapon really was, nor the horrific effects of radiation on the environment and biological systems. Now I know.

In the Hiroshima Museum, as a nuclear weapons lab whistleblower I wandered through the exhibits with TV cameras in my face, keeping it together by stuffing my emotions. I walked past the mangled lunch boxes and tricycles, thinking of the school children as I looked at the watches and clocks stopped at the moment the first thermonuclear weapon detonated on a human population. Shadows of people vaporized on stones, and on the steps of a building where one had sat, waiting for the bank to open on that fateful morning. A diorama showed the reality of dying people walking through the streets of Hiroshima with skin dripping and hanging from their bodies. In another image a man stood looking down at his eyeball he held in his hand. When I looked up at a model of LITTLE BOY, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I lost it and broke down in sobs which did not stop until half an hour later, half way through a press conference. The cameras continued to roll, capturing my horror and real feelings of the realization that scientists had made that “gadget