Like so many of the vitriolic lies of the Left, the anti-nuclear passion is intended to make us fear and detest anything connected to atomic power. Or, well, ANY power, come to think of it.

Of course, the traitors of the Left nagged and worried this theme from the end of World War II, while Uncle Joseph paid Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs and friends to steal every nuclear weapon blueprint and equation they could stuff into their skivvies. I’ve never heard a single Leftist bother to try explaining how it was OK for the USSR to have nuclear weapons, and nuclear powered submarines and nuclear powered electricity generating plants, but not OK for the rest of the world.

But all my life I’ve known crowds of liberal American teenagers who parrot the typical lies of the reflexive anti-nuclear movement. Not a one of them could tell you the difference between a proton and a crouton.

One New York City acquaintance revealed his “useful idiocy” when my visit with him in Manhattan coincided with a tedious day of anti-nuke demonstrations. In a remarkable display of dexterity and color audacity, the demonstrators had painted perplexing yellow footsteps and outlines of bodies on the sidewalks. When I asked WTF? my ex-friend told me it was to remember the Hiroshima victims who had been vaporized by the blast and left nothing but their shadows on a nearby wall.

I love this myth. It’s always trotted out to make people think how horrible a nuclear weapon must be, if it can vaporize a person yet leave a wall intact just a few feet away. Magic, evil, bad bad bad.

This is of course utter codswallop. Any blast that could vaporize an adult human would not leave anything intact anything less substantial than a foot-thick STEEL WALL if it were just a few feet from the human. Shadows of humans have been burned onto adjacent walls by much smaller munitions than nuclear weapons. The 80-pound illumination bomb developed by General George William Goddard, for instance, was capable of doing this, depending on the range. This was a flash device for illuminating large areas of territory for night aerial photography of entire cities.

My points are (1) sure, a nuclear blast can leave a burn shadow on a wall, but the fact that a body is no longer in the vicinity doesn’t mean it was vaporized; and (2)people will believe almost any damn thing they are told when they have NEVER been required to study the basics of science, math, biology, etc. and nor have they ever felt the need to personally check any facts with even 10 seconds of research.

Well, the lies have been working.

Well enough that when I lived in the SF Bay area, I found that the City of Berkeley had spent thousands of dollars for large brown signs neatly printed on sturdy aluminum, announcing that Berkeley was a “Nuclear-free City!”

I wonder if those chuckleheads ever think about where they get therapeutic and diagnostic radionuclides, or Cobalt/Cesium cancer therapy radiotherapy, or anti-static lens brushes for their fancy-pants cameras, smoke detectors… it’s a long list of benefits.

I need to learn a few more languages, cause I’ve run out of words to express my contempt for these people of low degree.

p.s. As is so often the case I am deep in debt to people who make so many amazingly provocative and instructive comments here, even though reading here always makes me increasingly aware of my growing iggerance.