Editor,
On Feb. 13 and 14, Los Alamos National Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories, along with the U.S. Department of Energy -- the department that employs its services as producers of weapons of mass destruction -- will be actively recruiting students at a job fair at UNM.
I, and many others, am very opposed to the presence of such institutions on campus. In fact, UNM, an institution dedicated to the education and ethical development of New Mexico's youth, is intimately engaged in research and technology to augment the afore mentioned weapons producers.
LANL is the birthplace of the weapons that caused horrors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LANL is still working to develop such weapons to efficiently kill on an extremely large scale. In other words, its mandate is not so different from such places as Auschwitz. The cost of the development of such horrendous technology goes well beyond even the considerable ethical sacrifice which a person engaged in such research must make; it affects not only those who engage in the research or those against whom such research is used or those who allow the research to take place without protest; it poisons the Earth, the air, the water and our very souls.
The recent news coverage of plutonium leaking into the water we drink, a river that borders two countries and once was host to a broad diversity of life, is a clear indication that LANL and its chums, the Department of Energy, still think of New Mexico as a desolate wasteland ideal for the same sort of tests as went on in past decades.
Sandia Labs, the oft-forgotten little brother of LANL, is actively seeking to expand its mandate in the production of weapons of mass destruction and with King George on the throne it won't have any problem doing so. Sen. Pete Domenici has worked hard and has secured roughly half of the single-largest increase in nuclear weapons development spending in history for New Mexico. Spending that contributes to the development of the world's already largest nuclear arsenal so that it reaches gluttonous proportions beyond anything ever experienced, even at the height of the Cold War.
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I plead with the students of UNM to use their educations for the benefit of New Mexico and the world at large. Tell LANL that you will not use your education to help build weapons of mass destruction and that you will not poison your brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers with the noxious leftover byproducts of such shameful research.
Use your education to better your community and the environment that your children have to live in. Tell them to get the hell off your campus. Tell them you refuse to take any part in their filthy research.
Devlin Jackson
UNM alumnus
