UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
SEPTEMBER 27,1978
Don't bury proposal
It is encouraging to hear that a proposal for an underground extension of Watson Library still lives.
From the silent treatment it received last May by University administrators it was feared that the proposal had been buried somewhere in the bowels of Strong Hall never to resurface.
Now, nearly four months after its introduction, the proposal will at long last be considered by the University. In fact, it has been given to the University Senate Library Committee, where it will be placed on the agenda, "probably within a week or so," James Seaver, professor of history and committee chairman, said earlier this week.
In addition, the proposal has been given to Allen Wiechert, director of facilities planning, for further study.
THE UNDERGROUND addition, proposed and designed by two architecture students, seems to have several advantages over the proposed construction of a library addition between Malott Hall and the Military Science Building. Construction cost is but one.
The 287,000-square-foot underground
addition, according to the students' proposal, would cost about $13 million, compared to $17 million for West Watson, the proposed library near the Military Science Building.
Also the two-floor underground addition would be cheaper to operate because it would be more energy efficient. The soil acts as a good insulator from heating and cooling loss.
AND FOR MOST KU students the underground addition would help to centralize the library system, making books accessible at one library instead of scattering them across the far reaches of the campus.
The underground proposal, moreover, is not untested. Several universities have had such additions with great success—Harvard University is an example.
But one concern of the Administration centers on the "aesthetics of the underground addition. Its construction would require the excavation of a large area in front of Watson—the effects of which are not known.
Nevertheless, the proposal does have several advantages that merit serious study now, not in four months.
Statement on abortion needs some clarifying
To the editor:
Mark Brown proposes in a let's to the Kaman,萨斯. If the presence of human brain is taken as the mark of human life..." the development of the brain may be taken as a criterion for determining when abortion should be permitted and when it should not. Brown suggests that "Other considerations may have relevance to the nature of abuse with Brown on both points. But I see a need to clarify his statement somewhat."
If we remember that human rationality can only be deduced from actions—that is, that rationality is perceptible only in rational acts—the difficulties become nonexistent. By the nature of things, it is impossible that even a third-trimester homunculus would be capable of a rational act—it must be totally dependent on the mother, which is incidentally, the Supreme Court's point of demarcation for legal abortion.
And from this point arises the slight misunderstanding that needs, I think, to be clarified, which is that of defining human rationality and the exact point at which it begins operation in the individual. At first this may appear to be a simple mistake. Brown originally addressed, but I think it can be easily and沥疗ly solved.
Obviously Brown uses the term "brain" not only for the physical organ, but also (and especially) for "intellectual capabilities." This is apparent from his saying that "... abortion would be wrong when the fetus passed the threshold between an animal brain and human brain." Clearly, Brown here means by "brain" that rational intellectuality which is perceived as being more of man and most higher animals are physiochemically essentially the same, this sentence can only mean "brains" in the sense of rationality.
This dependence, in fact, continues at least until the start of the sixty-fourth trimester, and it is precisely at that point, too, when the organism is presented an opportunity to perform a rational act. Until then, the organism is legally bound to take
part in a course of instruction, which serves as a continuation and extension of dependence on the mother. But at times it may be necessary to continue or terminating that course of instruction.
Obviously, the organism that chooses to continue to function in dependence cannot be said to have crossed the Supreme Court's line of demarcation. Likewise, only the choice to terminate that dependence can be seen as a rational act. So both guidelines on abortion reinforce each other; but both abortion should no longer be legal. Those points happen to coincide at the beginning of the sixi-fourth trimester.
The logical conclusion we must draw, then, is that all abortions in the first through sixty-third trimesters are legal. Any organism capable of pregnancy and rationality by terminating its education at the beginning of the sixty-fourth trimester has crossed ... the threshold between an animalborn and humanborn, and we be aborted until such other organisms might still be aborted until such time they demonstrate full-grown human intelligence and the cessation of dependence on the mother; or exacerbating a job, marrying, or a Corvette.
I'm sure some people will object that my addendum to Brown's proposal is unnecessary lenient. But while I realize that the group I have spoken of is without political power or any concrete social value, we should nevertheless give it a chance to demonstrate human attitudes, which some observers have. It must have an appeal in potential. If it then shows no sign of the rationality that is the hallmark of humankind, I would be the first to argue that abortion should be not only optional, but mandatory.
Steve Hicks
Steve Hicks Lawrence graduate student
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KANSAN
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U.S. ignoring nuclear drawbacks
At the age of 76, Edith Lange knows trouble when she sees it, and these days she can see it from her front door.
Lange lives on the northern edge of Burlington, Kan., and about two miles from her house, out across fallow fields that once gave high-yield millet and soybean crops, two large cranes are slowly putting together the structure that will eventually house the first nuclear reactor in Kansas. And Edith Ldnitz doesn't like it one bit.
"I'm going to be uneasy all the time if that plant starts up," she says as she scurries back and forth across her living room, momentarily unable to sit down from the sheer frustration of it all. "I don't understand why they insist on building something as dangerous as those plants."
TO LARGE, the plant is particularly threatening for the haze it might wreak on her organic garden, which covers three city lots and produces everything that she and her husband Max, 81, eat. The couple is vegetarian.
"Those nuclear plants are the most poisonous things," she said, calmer now, resting on the piano bench in her living room. "We have enough poisons in this country right now. We don't need any more. If they had an accident over there, it would just be terrible. You wouldn't be able to grow anything for 100 years. Who needs that?"
DURING THE LAST several years, the anti-nuke movement in this country has grown in leaps and bounds. The most pervasive symbols of growth have been the demonstrations at a nuclear construction site in Seabrook, N.H., where the movement began in 1976 with the arrest of 18 demonstrators.
Edith Lange is just one of a growing number of people who have decided they don't need it.
From that humble beginning the movement has grown to the point where 20,000 demonstrators flooded Seabrook in June to protest both the plant and the entire nuclear industry.
Who indeed?
In Kansas the anti-muck movement is represented by the Sunflower Alliance, an umbrella organization this year.
area, including Radioactive-Free Kansas, which is based in Lawrence.
safe storage of the highly dangerous radioactive wastes produced during the nuclear fuel cycle. A satisfactory guard against nuclear sabotage has yet to be discovered, and no convincing evidence has been found to deny the possibility of a nuclear disaster that would result in the contamination of an enormous region, bringing illness and death to millions of people and resulting in property damage costing billions of dollars.
THE SUNFLOWER Alliance sponsored a protest June 25 against the Wolf Creek power plant in Burlington, which is now nearly one-third completed and will eventually cost more than $1 billion to build and operate. That protest drew 860 people, by far the largest demonstration since 1970, for the plans for the plant were announced five years ago.
The Carter Administration is currently pushing a bill that would speed the licensing procedure for nuclear plants, a play that would often foreclose any environmental concerns and would make it easier for utilities to have plants licensed. The bill also puts final judgment of environment about nuclear licensing cases squarely in the hands of the state, which is generally susceptible to the special interest demands of local utilities.
To add insult to injury, work on the plant at Seabrook, which has become the symbol of the battle over nuclear power, recently began again after the Environmental Protection Agency announced that the hot discharge from the Seabrook plant would no effect on aquatic life in the Atlantic's normally chilly coastal waters.
Since that protest, two more groups have formed in Kansas to protest the plant, one in Emporia and one in Cedar Rapids.
Schaerfer said that some Sunflower Alliance members would take part in an occupation of the Black Fork nuclear plant site in Oklahoma on Oct. 7. That would be the first time such a group had been involved, said that the Alliance was considering blocking the tracks when the Wolf Creek nuclear reactor is shipped to Burington by rail. That move is expected sometime in
OF COURSE, by now the dangers of nuclear power are becoming more widely known. Government and industry continue to make hollow assurances that there is no danger from nuclear plants, basing those assurances on inaccurate and often dishonest studies that usually leave out more than they include.
If government is at all responsive to the wishes of the people, there should be no question about which side gives the answer.
SO, WHILE THE anti-nuke movement gains strength every day, government seems just as determined to keep the nuclear industry thriving. The two movements have become like two cats on parallel tracks, eventually the tracks will cross.
The facts are that no governmental or scientific agency has found a satisfactory method for the permanent, fail-
"People always say that changes can't be made. But when people really get informed about that plant, things are going to change," she said confidently. "It was people who were told they wouldn't and it's going to be people who are going to stop that plant."
DESPITE these overwhelming drawbacks to nuclear power, the government presses on with it, probed by the utilities, which seem oblivious to the consequences.
The 10-story dome housing a nuclear reactor is dwarfed by its 40-story cooling tower at Trojan nuclear power plant on the Columbia River north of Portland, Ore.
WASHINGTON—President Carter voiced high purpose in his inaugural address in calling for the eventual establishment of a nuclear weapon has repeatedly stressed the importance of reducing nuclear weapons through strategic armament limitation agreements with other countries.
The president's professed goals have made sense: The use of nuclear weapons would be suicidal, American and Russian overkill exceed the needs of deterrence many times over. Carter must curb the threat to peace and survival by limiting the Russians even at the cost of limiting ourselves.
SALT II, the strategic arms limitation agreement the United States is now negotiating with the Soviet Union, will have a vast expansion in nuclear weapons.
But the Carter administration—with the help of the Russians—is moving in the opposite direction, away from reductions and expansion nuclear weapons.
The figures are starting: from 9,100 to 12,300 in the case of the United States, and from 4,500 to 7,300 in the case of the Soviet Union. Each one of these thousands of nuclear weapons will be many times more powerful than either the two bombs that
And SALT III—the agreement that presumably will limit arms when SALT II expires in 1985—wil sanction even more arms if Carter decides, as he is being urged to do, to preserve and expand our land-based missile force.
destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
THE AMERICAN land-based missile, Minuteman, may be vulnerable to a Soviet strike by the 1980s. To lessen its vulnerability, some say the president should conceal Minuteman with thousands of decoy silos, and then replace it with M-X, a more accurate and more powerful mobile missile with nuclear weapon capability. Minuteman, SALT II nuclear weapon and the plans for Minuteman concealment or M-X development. The Russians have not agreed, and these issues are major obstacles to SALT II.
are biogas.
Although SALT II should not limit
capturing options, he should not conceal
Minuteman or deploy M-X. The need is not
compelling. The proposed solutions create
critical problems, and there is a better
alternative.
MINUTEMAN VULNERABILITY rests on improbabilities: The Soviets would have to be fully confident in a combat strike more than 1,000 American missiles in their silos.
The Soviets would have to be fully confident that the president of the United States would stand idly by and not fire Minuteman missiles even though he knew the Russians had launched a massive and irreversible attack on the United States.
The Soviets would have to be fully confident that the United States would not retaliate with its powerful submarine and bomber force, even after suffering this grievous and devastating attack with millions of American casualties.
CONCEALMENT OF Minuteman and of M-X would create a new problem. It would make verification of limitation uncertain, and this could imperil the entire SALT process. "Ifity" verification arrangements, such as occasional peeks at empty silos, are unlikely to be acceptable in the Senate.
The Russians are unlikely to stake their survival on these improbabilities. But the price of Senate ratification of SALIH may be a problem of Minimunian vulnerability.
Nonetheless, if the Russians and the Senate did agree to missile concealment with thousands of decoy silos—and the Russians might feel their enormous land mass gave them an edge in this competition—target multiplication would
demand weapons multiplication. We would have added another rationale for more arms.
With the M-X missile, the United States could destroy the Russian land-based missile force in a first strike. By thus increasing the incentive for the Soviets to strike first in a crisis, we would have taken a long step toward undermining stability and the barrier against nuclear use and nuclear war.
THE RUSSIANS imitated President Nixon's decision to deploy MIRVs, and as a result Minuteman may be vulnerable. A recent Pravda article suggests that the Russians will imitate a Carter decision to deploy MIX. We will both be less secure.
Carter has a better alternative. Use Minuteman to bargain for Russian reductions. Reduce the threat and our vulnerable weapons as well. Carter would have made SALT III a negotiation about the bombing of Syria's embassy expansion. And in doing so he would have removed a major obstacle to the prompt conclusion of SALT II.
David Linebaugh is a former deputy assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.