Editor,
This is a response to Bob Anderson's letter earlier this month as to whether Albuquerque has an emergency evacuation plan.
Yes, Bob, Albuquerque has had such a plan for decades. Call the city's Emergency Operations Center at 833-7327 if you want an appointment to read it. They're in the phone book.
No, Bob, any nuclear materials the Air Force might have here are certainly not stored under the Sunport runways.
The Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex is miles away from flight paths and, as its name implies, is safely tucked under hundreds of tons of rock, dirt, concrete and rebar.
The whole inventory of U.S. nuclear weapons is down to about 6,000 or so, about 8 percent of its Cold War maximum, and most of those are out on alert or at their war-fighting locations.
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We don't have many spares back in the "bomb dumps" any more.
And recently, Bush and Putin proposed cutting that number by 75 percent more.
What the munitions complexes may be storing is all the reclaimed materials from our dismantled weapons and purchased from Russia to keep it out of terrorist hands.
No, Bob, a nuclear weapon does not behave like a bullet tossed in a fire.
Think of it as more of a finely crafted machine which will not function if any of its thousands of parts is broken.
Test weapons complete minus the actual weapons-grade plutonium have been slammed into by trucks, been run over by trains, been fired by rockets into sand, gravel, water, concrete and steel walls, been exposed to vacuum and pressure and radiation and hundreds of decibels of sound, been shot through by bullets, been boiled in flaming jet fuel for most of a day.
It was all done to make sure they won't go off in any kind of accident imaginable.
The first nuclear weapon accident was in 1950 and the 32nd and last was in 1980, involving only 49 of the 69,000- plus weapons the United States ever built.
And never did any of them produce the slightest nuclear yield.
And no, Bob, there is no conflict of interest over Dr Hagengruber's directorship of the Public Policy Institute.
He serves as an unpaid volunteer, not as a salaried employee of UNM.
Gary Hoe
Sometime Daily Lobo reader
