It seems to me that “shameful” and “shameless” basically mean the same thing, yet one is “full” and the other is “less.” How is this possible? –Katherine C., Van Nuys, California
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You are usually so hip I checked your naive repetition of the excuses for bomb testing five times before I was sure it was not satire [July 3]. Let’s get two points out of the way first: (1) There is no known case of a nuclear bomb being tested and not going “boom.” The likelihood of a nuclear warhead failing is almost nil. (2) The purpose of nuclear weapons is to threaten to use them. Combine these and the scenario that weapons tests are supposedly preventing runs like this: “Ten percent of the weapons with which the Yankee dogs are threatening us haven’t been tested. Our scientists are convinced there is one chance in a thousand they won’t work. If we attack now, 10 percent of our cities have one chance in a thousand of surviving until U.S. satellites redirect the last sub-based warheads. I suggest we attack now!”
The fact is, we have a bomb-testing bureaucracy because we once needed to test bombs; we now test bombs because the bureaucracy wants to have a purpose. –Frank Palmer, Chicago
