Editor,
Have I missed the announcement of the emergency evacuation plan for Albuquerque due to a terrorist attack? We do not have any nuclear power plants here but the Air Force has 2,300 big nuclear warheads stored right at the cross point of the two major runways at Albuquerque Sunport and nuclear warheads are shipped in an out of here all the time.
A great deal of concern is rightly focusing now on the possibility of how a commercial passenger jet could be used to plunge into one of the 103 nuclear power plants or nuclear fuel rod storage tanks around the country, as happened at the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon Sept. 11.
The result would be a large cloud of radioactive materials spreading over the immediate area and evacuation plans are being developed for those areas. But do we have a plan for Albuquerque?
What if an aircraft loaded with fuel crashed into the massive nuclear bunker, said to be the second largest in the world, at the Sunport and the intense heat from the fuel fire caused just one of the warheads to explode? The spread of nuclear materials would probably make the city of Albuquerque uninhabitable for thousands of years.
We need to hear from our public safety officials so that some of the population might get safely away. We need to know where to go, what route to take, how would we be fed, clothed, what would we need to take?
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We also need to get that bomb dump out of our city of half a million people.
I heard a woman caller on a KUNM radio program recently ask the vice president for security threat assessment at Sandia National Laboratories, Roger Hagengruber, about this concern and he replied because it was a classified military matter, he could not talk about it.
Since Hagengruber works for Sandia, he also is an employee of Lockheed Martin, the largest war goods supplier to the federal government. He is also head of the Public Policy Research Institute at UNM, but it sounds to me like he is as much a danger to our public health and safety as any terrorist.
I would take this to the FBI but they have their hands full with the anthrax threat.
I wonder if the UNM Board of Regents has looked into Hagengruber's employment as a conflict of interest to our University and city?
President Eisenhower warned us in 1961 of the new immense military industrial complex that had been created to win World War II.
He said, "We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the structure of our society."
It seems the existence of our city is very much in danger and no one is taking it seriously. If we do not have one, it is time we had an emergency evacuation plan for our city, not more denials of the dangers we face. We need to turn President Eisenhower's words into action also so that his warning of "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power... (do not) endanger our liberties or democratic process."
Bob Anderson
UNM instructor
