Translations

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday it makes "all the sense in the world" to study the feasibility of designing a nuclear weapon capable of penetrating deeply buried targets.

Rumsfeld defended the proposed 8.5 million-dollar study of a "robust nuclear earth penetrator" at a Senate hearing after it came under fire from Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat.

Feinstein noted that Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has acknowledged in previous hearings that no missile could bore deep enough into the earth to trap all fallout from a nuclear explosion. [...]

Rumsfeld said more than 70 countries have programs to build facilities underground, and have available to them equipment that can dig chambers the size of a basketball court from rock in a single day.

"We can't go in there and get at things in solid rock underground," Rumsfeld said.

Translation: "We have 'every right in the world' to bomb the shit out of any of 70 (!) countries which maintain 'programs to build facilities underground'."

"The only thing we have is very large, very dirty nuclear weapons. So the choice is: do we want to have nothing and only a large, dirty nuclear weapon, or would we rather have something in between. That is the issue," he said.

Translation A: "We don't fucking care that the National Research Council's just-released study of the matter concluded that 'something in-between' 'could not go deep enough to eliminate fallout, as some advocates have asserted, and it estimated that the victims in a nearby city could range from a few hundred to more than a million, depending on factors such as the weather and population density.' So long as they're niggers, we're happy to kill five million...twenty million...whatever it takes."

Translation B: "Are you people really this thick? It doesn't matter whether it works or not, it matters whether we can pay our friends in the military contracting industry billions and billions and billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to study the matter. Haven't you idiots ever heard of 'National Missile Defense'? Sheesh."

Posted by Eddie Tews at April 29, 2005 10:12 AM