Spud 2 The Madness Continues Download

[Nguyet Edmondson]

Spuds nearly 15 and although he is no longer the youngest or the smallest in his dorm, his second year at boarding school is beset with women trouble, misguided late-night adventures and excruciating family visits. With his dreams of a stage career in tatters after a disastrous house play production of Noah's Ark, Spud, armed with only his wits and his diary, invites us to delve further into the mind of a boy who discovers that the long path to manhood is never easy... especially when all around him the madness continues...

The year is 1991, and Spud Milton's long walk to manhood is still creeping along at an unnervingly slow pace. Approaching the ripe old age of fifteen and still with no signs of the much anticipated ball-drop, Spud is coming to terms with the fact that he may well be a freak of nature. With a mother hell-bent on emigrating, a father making a killing out of selling homemade moonshine, and a demented grandmother called Wombat, the new year seems to offer little except extreme embarrassment and more mortifying Milton madness. But Spud is returning to a boarding school where he is no longer the youngest or the smallest. His dormitory mates, known as the Crazy Eight, have an unusual new member and his house has a new clutch of first years (the Normal Seven). If Spud thinks his second year will be a breeze, however, he is seriously mistaken. He is soon beset with women trouble, coerced into misguided late-night adventures, and finds his dreams of a famous career on the stage in tatters after landing the part of the Dove of Peace in a disastrous house play production of Noah's Ark. Hilarious, bitter-sweet, tragic and real, join Spud as he takes another tentative step forward while all around him the madness continues ...

Until the 1976 presidential primaries, the process of seeking a reduction of such tensions was called "detente." We may find synonyms for the word, but there is no alternative to the process. We can call a potato a "spud," or beer "suds," but it will not change the way they taste and smell and feel. More importantly, it will not change how they affect us and I think the same can be said of detente.

We must not now permit parochial political maneuvering to jeopardize an effort to arrive at a relationship with the Soviet Union, and with the other nuclear powers, based on a reasoned understanding of the common dangers of failing to come to an agreement to live in peace with one another. The only alternative to achieving some workable, peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union is to live with the omnipresent threat that a devastating nuclear war will put an end to civilization as we know it.

It is vital that all Americans see through the emotional, ideological smokescreen that has been spewed forth by men of small vision and that the American people understand that the alternative to detente is the continuation of the arms race. They should know that the stockpiling of more and more weapons of destruction in nuclear arsenals around the world simply raises the mathematical possibility that these nuclear weapons will be used.

There has been, in my lifetime of public service, no issue that more clearly demands solution. Nor has there been any issue which better identifies those who possess the qualities of leadership and national purpose that are so urgently needed today. For what can be more vital to the national interest than finding a rational way to bring the nuclear arms race under control, to end the growing danger of nuclear weapons being used by a government, a group or even an individual?

The alternative to making this effort is to move inexorably closer to nuclear devastation. And I think this grim reality has to be faced. This reality must not be distorted by ideological speculation or political rhetoric. The dangers must not be minimized. We must seek and find leaders who will dedicate their effort to achieving a mutually acceptable understanding that will enable us and our descendants to live in peace.

Why do I come here today and use this occasion to speak so starkly? Simply because I think time is short and the opportunities to prevent predicted nuclear catastrophe from becoming reality are relatively few. Important forums such as this must be used to set the record straight. For, it is my view, that if the people of our nation know the facts, they will act with wisdom and common sense to take the steps necessary to prevent disaster.

In 1945, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the lethal power of 13 kilotons, that is, a destructive force equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT. That single bomb killed 85,000 human beings in one apocalyptic instant. It brought incalculable suffering to tens of thousands of others.

A few weeks after the bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki I visited both cities. I saw what those small primitive atom bombs could do. A vivid memory of that blasted landscape of death and total destruction still haunts me. It animates my own conviction that the alternatives to detente, that is, either of remaining in a state of perpetual hostility or of taking that final step toward war, must both be rejected as a form of madness.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki statistics of death are insignificant compared with the statistical possibilities of today's monster bombs. Scientists say that one one-megaton weapon can completely destroy a city the size of Boston. In addition, its lethal fallout would cast a pall over 1,000 square miles. That is a one megaton weapon. But, predictions are that a nuclear first-strike exchange would involve around 1,000 megatons. Such a blast would cause lethal fallout over 5 billion square miles which is roughly the size of the United States.

Now, you can even make instant calculations of the devastating effects of nuclear weapons by a very simple device called the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer sold by the Government Printing Office for about $2.50. I think that's a commentary on our times, that the G.P.O. would sell such a device. For example: You can find out that the blast effects of a one megaton weapon would be sufficient to knock down buildings in a 20 to 30 mile radius of the blast. You can learn that even in a relatively small blast glass fragments become lethal missiles. In fact, you can learn much more than you want to know. But the details it provides become mere curiosities when counterpoised to the most telling statistic of all: we now have a nuclear capability of killing every man, woman and child on earth 15 times over.

The present United States nuclear arsenal contains well over 4,000 deliverable intercontinental warheads, each of which can destroy a city. We have thousands of smaller tactical warheads. Our standard warhead dwarfs the Hiroshima bomb. It is ten times more powerful and has a destructive force equivalent to a million pounds of TNT.

At last count, the United States, if it unleashed its arsenal, could destroy the Soviet Union 44 times over, and the Soviet Union could destroy the United States at least 22 times over. A former Polaris officer told me not long ago that we are actually running out of targets in the Soviet Union.

Despite the differences in the nature and quality of each nation's nuclear arsenal (we have concentrated on accuracy and the Soviet Union has concentrated on size), despite differences in the size of warheads and the sophistication of delivery systems, both we and the Soviet Union have reached a measurable technological plateau. We can destroy each other no matter which of us strikes first.

Another indisputable fact is that, given our present technology, defense against the use of these weapons is impossible. The United States can be destroyed within 18 to 30 minutes after a launch. So can the Soviet Union. Eighteen minutes does not leave much time for defense or for reflection or for prayer.

It is a powerful irony, and one whose point must not be missed, that the scientists who invented nuclear weapons both in the United States and in the Soviet Union, who are in a unique position to evaluate the full destructive potential of the weapons they have created, warn us that unless the arms race is stopped, the human race will be annihilated.

Soviet citizens do not hear these warnings from dissident physicist Andre Sakharov, alone. Both Professor Peter Kapitza, Director of the Institute of Physical Research in Moscow, and the late Professor Lev Artsimovich, former director of Kurchatov Institute for Thermonuclear Research, have been equally insistent in their warnings.

In the United States among the scientists associated with the Manhattan Project, I think of Columbia University's Nobel laureate in physics, I. I. Rabi, and of the late Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago. Warnings have come to us from France as well from Professor Francois Perrin, the former head of the French atomic energy commission.

It is important that we keep the fundamental purpose of detente firmly in mind. It is a very simple one: to live in peace and to assure the survival of the United States and the survival of our civilization.

The American people must not be deflected from the pursuit of this primary objective by any secondary consideration. We must distinguish clearly the central thrust of our policy from the disputes raised over whether secret agreements have been concluded which might place our nation at some disadvantage.

My own feeling is that secret negotiations should be shunned. They foster uncertainty and fear that the United States, through some secret process, may somehow be placed at a disadvantage or that it may lose its position of strength.

I am convinced that, at this time, such a fear is unwarranted. We still maintain the military primacy we bought so dearly in World War II and which we have paid for many times over in the succeeding years. Clearly, we should guarantee the American people that no nation will surpass us in defensive capacity while the greatest issue between nations the issue of how to insure world peace remains unresolved.

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