On February 5th we interviewed with Mathew Bolton, Pace university professor who won a noble peace prize as one of the members of a huge organization called ICAN. He was really nice and we learned a lot about him and what he had to share with us. One thing that interested me specifically was when i learned how close some of these nuclear test sites and some of the factories that make things that nuclear weapons use. For example there is a factory that makes uranium not too far from LREI which gave me the realization that these problems are not as far away as I thought. There was also multiple nuclear bomb test sites in Manhattan that are still being cleaned up. There is one in Chelsea, one in Staten island and one in queens that are still being remediated. After that he brought up a good reason that nuclear weapons don’t always stop attacks, like 9/11, nuclear weapons did not stop that or what’s going on in Israel. Those are just two examples of how nuclear weapons fail to do their job. Another thing that i thought was crazy was a story he told, back in the late 70s, at a time of great tension, there were people stationed at a nuclear launch silo at Sandy hook and they saw a plane and thought it was a enemy plane, so they were in the middle of the countdown, about to launch a nuke at the plane but at around 5 seconds till launch they determined that the plane was just a commercial plane. I thought that story was wild and how life would be different if they launched that nuke.
